60% of Urban Jamaicans Live in Unplanned Housing. That’s Worse Than Nearly Every Country in the Region

• 20% of all Jamaicans live in informal settlements
• 60% of the urban population lives in unplanned housing
• That ratio is worse than nearly every LAC country
• Full e-titling rollout was targeted for 2027-2028

Roughly 20 percent of Jamaicans live in informal settlements, Prime Minister Andrew Holness told Parliament during his 2025-26 Budget Debate contribution, a figure he said becomes even more dire in cities: about 60 percent of the urban population resides in unplanned, substandard housing, a higher proportion than nearly every other country in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Holness tied that comparison directly to a specific policy consequence: decades of rapid urbanisation have outpaced proper planning, he said, leaving a significant number of Jamaicans unable to leverage land as an asset, access credit, or receive essential public services. Beyond poor living conditions, these areas often become breeding grounds for gangs, threatening national security and economic progress, a framing that links informal housing directly to the crime statistics this publication has covered in Montego Bay’s own turnaround.

The government’s response, as outlined in that same presentation, runs on two separate tracks moving at different speeds. Vendor selection and system implementation for the electronic land titling programme, the same e-Titles project whose contract was eventually signed in August 2025, was targeted for full roll-out by 2027-2028, following legislative amendments to the Registration of Titles Act. Separately, the Housing Agency of Jamaica has been tasked with upgrading 81 informal communities, with work beginning at Eden Park, St Mary, and a broader target of 10,000 housing starts and 4,000 community upgrade projects.

Holness also named a structural obstacle that policy alone cannot fix: squatter communities are significant voting blocs and have determined the outcomes of several parliamentary and local elections, an acknowledgement that regularising informal settlements carries real political risk for whichever government actually forces the issue, a tension that helps explain why a problem this well-documented, and this consistently described in nearly identical terms across successive administrations, has still not been resolved.

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