Melissa Uncovered More Than Roofing. It Exposed Jamaica’s Land Justice Problem.

Kingston, Jamaica, 28 December 2025

Two months after Hurricane Melissa made landfall, one of the most searching analyses of what the storm uncovered has come not from a government agency or a development economist, but from an architect and conservationist examining the aerial footage of the destruction. Her argument is that the storm did not only destroy buildings. It exposed the structural conditions, in land ownership, in planning access and in housing design, that made those buildings so vulnerable, and that those conditions have deep historical roots that a physical rebuilding programme alone will not address.

Among the most striking observations in that analysis is this: nestled within the zones of maximum destruction across Black River and the western parishes, there were structures that survived Melissa’s Category 5 conditions with minimal damage. When examined carefully, those structures turn out to share a specific characteristic. Many of them are examples of Jamaica’s traditional historic architecture, buildings with high ceilings, wide verandas, thick walls and design features that, whatever their age, happen to perform well in high-wind conditions. The hurricane did not destroy all old buildings. It destroyed old buildings that were neglected and poorly maintained, and new buildings that were built without adequate regard for structural performance.

The Land Justice Question

Beyond architecture, the storm exposed a land ownership dynamic that the architect identifies as a colonial inheritance requiring active reform. The concentration of land in government ownership, paralleling what she describes as the role of the former enslavers as the majority landowner, has left a large proportion of Jamaica’s poorest communities in precarious tenure situations. Residents building on land they do not formally own, under private leases or informal arrangements that provide no security of title, have no pathway to formal mortgage financing, no protection against displacement and no mechanism for converting their homes into intergenerational wealth assets.

The phenomenon of land scamming, where individuals are offered 10-year leases on plots with utility services attached, is widespread in poorer communities. Those leases do not constitute secure tenure. They do not qualify for formal mortgage financing. And they do not give residents any meaningful stake in the land on which they build, meaning that the investment they make in construction is entirely at risk if the lease is not renewed. Hurricane Melissa did not create this problem, but it dramatised its consequences with devastating clarity: when a storm destroyed a home on informally occupied land, there was no insurance to fall back on, no formal title to support a rebuilding loan and no legal standing from which to demand fair compensation.

What a Genuinely Inclusive Rebuild Requires

The rebuilding of Black River and the western parishes, approached honestly, requires more than the construction of climate-resilient buildings on safer land. It requires a reform of the land access framework that has historically excluded Jamaica’s poorest citizens from formal property ownership, a reform of the tenure system that makes secure title a realistic aspiration for every Jamaican family rather than a privilege of those who can afford the legal and administrative costs of formalisation, and a reform of the planning system that incorporates community voices at the design stage rather than presenting completed plans to communities as facts to be accepted.

Jamaica’s post-Melissa rebuild offers a genuine opportunity to make those reforms. The scale of the disruption is large enough to justify institutional change. The political will expressed in the government’s rebuilding commitments is real. The question is whether the frameworks through which the rebuild is delivered, NaRRA, the UDC, the NHT, the Housing Agency of Jamaica, will be designed and resourced to deliver justice in tenure and access alongside resilience in construction. Those two goals are not separable. A rebuilt Jamaica in which the poorest communities remain on insecure land is a Jamaica that will face the same pattern of catastrophic loss the next time a Category 5 storm arrives.