Jamaica’s building code had not been fundamentally rewritten since 1908, drafted in response to the earthquake that levelled much of Kingston the year before. Hurricane Melissa, a Category 5 storm that struck the island on October 28, 2025, made the case for a new one impossible to postpone.
Local Government Minister Desmond McKenzie told Parliament during the 2026-27 Sectoral Debate that a strengthened national code, requiring new buildings to withstand Category 5 hurricanes, will roll out through the current fiscal year. Enforcement, not legislation, has been the persistent weak point. Jamaica already had a Building Act, dating to 2018, along with the Town and Country Planning Act and municipal by-laws. Compliance was the problem: McKenzie noted that most of the destruction after Melissa fell on structures built without proper zoning or engineering approval, disproportionately in lower-income communities.
The new measures pair the tougher standard with stronger enforcement powers for municipal corporations, mandatory compliance checks, and an expanded body of building officers, funded through a revised establishment structure approved by the Ministry of Finance. McKenzie was careful to frame the rebuild as more than restoration, telling Parliament it is meant to replace lost infrastructure with modern, climate-smart and resilient structures rather than simply rebuild what was lost.
The construction sector had already been active before the storm hit. In the first nine months of the fiscal year, over 3,700 building applications were submitted, an 11 percent increase on the same period the year before, with a combined investment value of $46.1 billion, of which $36.1 billion had been approved within the standard 90-day benchmark.
Architects and planners are pushing the rebuild in a specific direction: not simply stronger concrete, but a return to techniques Jamaica already had. Writing in the Gleaner, architectural historian Patricia Green has argued for reviving the island’s timber-framed vernacular building tradition, refined after the 1907 earthquake and proven resilient against both hurricanes and seismic shock, rather than treating imported codes as the only route to resilience.
Whether enforcement holds up once the immediate memory of Melissa fades is the open question. Jamaica has passed strong building legislation before. What it has struggled with is making sure it gets used.
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