Kingston, Jamaica, 10 April 2023. A reader writing to the Jamaica Observer puts an uncomfortable question into the public record: is the Jamaican diaspora pricing local residents out of the housing market? The letter draws a connection that is empirically debated but anecdotally persistent. Jamaicans living abroad, earning in stronger currencies, purchasing homes they intend to rent, convert to short-term lets, or hold as investments rather than occupy, are creating demand at price points the local workforce cannot reach. The letter writer does not have hard data, and says so. What she has is a pattern of observation familiar to anyone who has followed the Jamaican property market over the past decade and watched what has happened to land prices and rental rates in communities where diaspora investment is concentrated.
The argument about foreign exchange purchasing power and housing affordability is not unique to Jamaica. It has been made in Portugal, in Mexico, in Greece, and in every other country where a significant population living abroad earns enough in a stronger currency to participate meaningfully in the domestic property market while locals on domestic salaries cannot. The mechanism is the same in each case: external buyers can pay prices that local buyers, constrained by local wage levels and local mortgage ceilings, cannot match. Market prices rise to clear supply at what the highest bidder will pay. The highest bidder is frequently not the local family that most needs the housing.
The NHT critique embedded in the letter is sharper than it first appears. If the Trust’s primary mechanism for delivering affordable housing, adjusting loan limits, simply results in developers and vendors absorbing the additional borrowing capacity through higher prices, then the NHT is not delivering affordability. It is subsidising asset price inflation. That is a version of the argument that the government’s own housing minister has made in recent budget debates, and the fact that the same concern appears simultaneously in a reader’s letter and in the minister’s statement to Parliament suggests it is not a fringe view. It is the dominant observation of anyone who has watched the gap between NHT loan limits and entry-level market prices for the past decade.
The crime connection the letter writer draws is more contested but worth engaging seriously rather than dismissing. The argument is that housing unaffordability, which traps people in conditions they cannot improve through legitimate means, is a structural contributor to the conditions that make crime a rational choice for some. This is not a fringe criminological position. It is a mainstream one in the academic literature on urban violence and economic exclusion. Jamaica’s specific version of it, where communities with high crime rates sit adjacent to communities with rapidly appreciating property values, is visible enough that it does not require sophisticated analysis to identify. The connection between housing and crime is not a simple one to measure or act on, but a housing policy that does not take it seriously is a housing policy with a gap.
The letter writer’s proposed solution, asking the diaspora to stay out of the Jamaican property market, is not one that any serious policy framework would adopt. Diaspora investment is a significant source of capital for the Jamaican economy, and restricting it in the housing sector would require legal mechanisms that Jamaica does not have and would create economic distortions that are difficult to predict. What the letter does, which is more useful than its proposed solution, is name the tension clearly: when a market that should be serving local housing need is instead serving global investment demand, the people most in need of that market are the ones it least serves. Addressing that tension is one of the harder design problems in Jamaican housing policy, and it does not get easier for being left unaddressed.
The supply answer is the most defensible one. A market that cannot produce enough units to satisfy both diaspora investment demand and local occupancy demand is a market with a supply problem, not only a demand one. Building enough housing to serve both categories of demand without forcing a zero-sum competition between them is the goal that Jamaica’s current policy agenda has named but not yet achieved. The diaspora’s role in the property market is not going to diminish. The question is whether domestic supply can grow fast enough to make their participation add to the total without subtracting from what local families need.
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