Six Weeks Before Melissa: Inside the NHT’s Last Big Housing Push for St Elizabeth

Kingston, Jamaica, 14 September 2025

The National Housing Trust is intensifying its push to bring new housing supply to market at scale, with more than 18,000 units at various stages of facilitation and contracts being finalised for a further 3,250 homes across five new developments, including 750 units in St Elizabeth’s Friendship Oaks Phase 2. The Trust is also preparing a developer webinar, its second staging, aimed at bringing new participants into the Guaranteed Purchase Programme and the Developers Programme, two financing mechanisms that have fundamentally changed how formal housing is delivered in Jamaica since their launch in 2019.

For St Elizabeth, the Friendship Oaks Phase 2 development represents a meaningful commitment by the NHT to a parish that has historically received less formal housing investment than the more densely populated urban parishes. The 750 units, when built, will provide NHT contributors in St Elizabeth and surrounding areas with access to formally developed, titled residential properties financed on NHT mortgage terms, which carry below-market interest rates and longer repayment periods than the commercial banking sector offers.

How the NHT’s Developer Model Works

The NHT’s Developers Programme, now in its sixth year, has facilitated over 11,000 houses across 13 projects since launch. Under the programme, the Trust provides land to developers as security for financing, reimburses infrastructure costs in phases as construction progresses, and commits to purchasing 80 per cent of completed units at an agreed price. Developers sell the remaining 20 per cent on the open market. The model offers developers demand certainty that reduces financing risk, and it gives the NHT a mechanism for expanding housing supply without bearing all of the construction risk directly.

The Guaranteed Purchase Programme adds a complementary layer, enabling developers who have already secured their own land and financing to offer units to the NHT for purchase and onward sale to contributors. Together, the two programmes represent the most significant structural change in how Jamaica delivers affordable housing in a generation, shifting the NHT from a primarily passive mortgage institution to an active market participant that shapes supply rather than simply financing demand.

What the Push Means for St Elizabeth Before Melissa

The NHT’s September 2025 developer engagement push came six weeks before Hurricane Melissa made landfall. Its significance, in retrospect, is that it represents the last major formal housing initiative targeting St Elizabeth under normal market conditions. The Friendship Oaks Phase 2 contracts being finalised in September 2025 were planning for a St Elizabeth that, within two months, would look entirely different.

The 750 units planned for Friendship Oaks Phase 2 were conceived as a response to an existing housing deficit in a growing parish. After Melissa, the deficit would be transformed by the destruction of tens of thousands of homes, and the NHT’s post-disaster role would shift from delivering formal housing supply to managing an emergency shelter and reconstruction programme of unprecedented scale. The developer pipeline that existed in September 2025 would need to be reconsidered in light of a post-Melissa map of need that looked nothing like the one on which it was based.

Lessons for the Rebuild

The NHT’s pre-Melissa work in St Elizabeth offers a template that the post-Melissa reconstruction effort will need to build on rather than replace. The Developers Programme and the Guaranteed Purchase Programme are proven mechanisms for delivering formal housing at scale. Adapted to the post-Melissa context, they could be the vehicles through which the new inland housing developments planned as part of Black River’s redevelopment are financed, built and delivered to families who have lost everything. The challenge will be to bring these instruments to bear at a speed and scale that the emergency demands, while maintaining the quality and tenure security standards that have been their distinguishing feature under normal conditions.

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