Your Dream Home, Someone Else’s Claim: Jamaica Must Confront Squatting

For many Jamaicans overseas, building a home back home is not merely a property transaction. It is the physical reward for decades of sacrifice: night shifts, overtime, postponed holidays, careful remittances and the quiet determination to return one day to something solid.

The house may take ten, twenty or even thirty years to complete. A boundary wall goes up first. Then a foundation. A few years later, another floor. Tiles arrive in a barrel; fixtures are bought on visits; relatives are asked to watch the site. Slowly, the dream becomes concrete.

Then a shack appears on adjoining land. Or somebody moves into an unfinished or abandoned house nearby. No permission is evident, basic sanitation may be absent and complaints appear to travel from one public office to another without producing a timely solution. What began as one unlawful occupation can become permanent through official drift.

For the returning resident who invested a lifetime’s earnings, this is not an abstract debate about land policy. It is the view from the veranda.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness has now said the Government will develop a programme to formalise and regularise irregularly settled communities while preventing further squatting. Speaking in St Ann after the recent demolition of homes at Cooper’s Pen in Trelawny, he made two points that must remain together: squatting cannot be encouraged, but every Jamaican should have a fair opportunity to obtain land and housing.

That balance is morally necessary. It is also years overdue.

Compassion Cannot Mean Abandoning the Law

The families living in informal settlements are not a single type of people. Many are workers, parents and elderly residents pushed towards insecure tenure by low wages, unaffordable land, inadequate rental options and a formal housing market that has never served everyone. Treating poverty as criminality would be both false and cruel.

But recognising hardship cannot require Jamaica to pretend that unlawful occupation has no victim. Land may belong to a pensioner, a family, a farmer, a small developer or a member of the diaspora who spent decades financing it. Their title does not become morally irrelevant because they live overseas, are temporarily absent or have not yet developed the property.

“A compassionate country must help people in housing distress, but compassion cannot be financed by quietly transferring the burden to another ordinary Jamaican,” said Dean Jones, founder of Jamaica Homes and a Realtor Associate. “The person whose land is occupied may also have sacrificed for forty years to own it.”

The Government’s proposed programme must therefore distinguish between large, established communities requiring planned intervention and individual acts of occupation involving a vacant lot, unfinished building or privately owned house. These situations may overlap socially, but they are not administratively identical. A settlement requiring roads, drainage, tenure assessment and relocation cannot be handled in the same way as an identifiable person entering somebody else’s property without consent.

The Returnee’s Particular Vulnerability

Distance creates opportunity for abuse. A home may stand empty for much of the year because its owner is still working in London, Toronto, New York or elsewhere. An unfinished development may contain units retained by a developer or homes bought by overseas Jamaicans who have not arranged active management. Grass grows, a window is broken, somebody gains access and the property slowly begins to look ownerless.

It is not ownerless.

Jamaica Homes has heard accounts from property owners and residents of vacant or unfinished buildings being occupied without permission. In one reported case, a person moved into an unused dwelling beside a heavily invested home despite the occupied building having no proper utility connections. Outdoor washing and toileting reportedly followed, creating serious concerns about privacy, sanitation and the peaceful use of the neighbouring property. In other cases, residents have described threats, intimidation or disruptive activity associated with unlawfully occupied premises.

These accounts should not be used to brand every informal settler dangerous. Nor should reports of criminal conduct be published as fact without police or court confirmation. They do, however, expose a practical failure: lawful residents are too often expected to tolerate worsening conditions until an incident becomes serious enough to trigger decisive attention.

That is governance by escalation. It rewards the creation of a crisis.

“A title should not lose its practical meaning simply because its owner boarded a plane,” Jones said. “If Jamaicans abroad are continually told to invest at home, the country must be equally serious about protecting what they lawfully acquire.”

This matters beyond any eventual sale price. A returnee may have no intention of selling. The loss is felt through anxiety, restricted enjoyment of the home, additional security costs, family members becoming reluctant to visit and the fear that children will inherit a dispute instead of an asset. Property value is only one part of the damage; quality of life is another.

Neglect Creates the Opening

Owners also have responsibilities. Leaving land overgrown, a building unsecured or a house unattended for years is not consent to occupation, but it is an invitation to risk. Vacant property can attract illegal dumping, vandalism, animals, unauthorised occupation and conflict among neighbours who are left to manage the consequences.

Diaspora buyers should not build and disappear. They need verified boundaries, current title and tax records, photographs of the site, reliable local contacts, scheduled inspections and written arrangements with a reputable property manager or attorney where appropriate. Contractors should work under clear written contracts, with defined stages, payment terms and independent verification of progress. Cheap informality at the beginning can become extremely expensive at the end.

The same caution applies before purchase. A beautiful house is not isolated from its surroundings. Buyers should visit at different times of day, examine adjoining lots, speak carefully with neighbours, verify proposed developments and access roads, check drainage and planning conditions, and use professionals prepared to say, “Do not buy this one.” A commission should never be more important than a client’s safety or long-term peace.

None of those precautions excuses trespass. They simply recognise the uncomfortable truth that ownership from a distance requires active stewardship.

Informal Growth Has a Public Cost

The issue is larger than individual disputes. A 2008 assessment referenced in a UN-Habitat Caribbean strategy identified more than 750 squatter settlements in Jamaica, housing about 600,000 people at that time. The age of those figures itself makes the case for a current, transparent national audit. Government cannot credibly control what it has not recently mapped.

Unplanned settlement can place homes on floodplains, steep slopes, road reserves and land without adequate water, sewage, waste collection or emergency access. The consequences are then carried by residents, neighbours and the public purse. After a fire, flood, landslide or hurricane, the State is asked to rescue people from risks that effective planning should have prevented from multiplying.

Neighbourhood decline is not caused by poverty as a character flaw. It is caused when no institution reliably enforces basic rules: waste accumulates, sewage is unmanaged, access is blocked, structures rise without approval, vacant lots become dumps and threats go unanswered. Those failures can occur in informal and formal communities alike. The difference is that insecure tenure and absent infrastructure make them harder to correct.

The Prime Minister is right that Jamaica cannot be “two-mouthed” about the issue. Political leaders cannot condemn squatting after a public controversy while tolerating its steady expansion between controversies. Nor can regularisation become a signal that the fastest route to land is to occupy it first and negotiate later. That would punish citizens who save, apply, wait, pay and follow the law.

What a Credible Programme Must Do

The proposed national programme needs more than another announcement. It should begin with an islandwide, publicly accountable mapping of informal settlements and unlawfully occupied state and private properties. Each location should be assessed for ownership, length and nature of occupation, environmental danger, infrastructure, vulnerability and the feasibility of regularisation.

Where regularisation is lawful, safe and sustainable, residents should have a structured route to tenure, supported by affordable payment arrangements and proper infrastructure. Where land is environmentally dangerous, required for public works or privately owned and unavailable for settlement, relocation and appropriate housing support must be planned humanely. There must also be a rapid response mechanism for new occupation so a fresh structure does not become a twenty-year dispute while agencies exchange letters.

Private owners need one clearly identified route for reporting occupation, verifying ownership and obtaining coordinated assistance. Local authorities, the police, land agencies, social services and the courts must understand their separate roles. Police should not be asked to decide civil title disputes, but credible threats, violence, theft, vandalism and other suspected crimes must not be dismissed merely because a land disagreement exists in the background.

The programme should also bring abandoned buildings and unmanaged lots into view. Owners should receive notices requiring basic security, sanitation and maintenance, while communities should have a reliable system for reporting dangerous structures. Prevention must reach both sides of the boundary.

“Jamaica does not have to choose between human dignity and property rights,” Jones said. “A serious housing policy protects the vulnerable, respects lawful ownership and stops new informal occupation before desperation hardens into permanence.”

A Test of Whether Investment Is Truly Welcome

Jamaica regularly asks its diaspora to invest, return, build businesses and bring expertise home. That invitation must mean more than welcoming the money. It must include predictable planning, dependable records, enforceable contracts, safe communities and effective protection of property.

Returnees should not arrive with the illusion that buying or building in Jamaica can be managed casually from thousands of miles away. But neither should they be told, after doing everything lawfully, that occupation next door—or inside their own building—is simply a problem they must learn to live with.

The Government’s promise could become a defining housing reform if it treats the issue in full: not only the pain of families facing demolition, but also the quieter distress of owners and neighbours who have spent years watching unlawful occupation become entrenched through delay.

Housing need is real. So are property rights. So are sanitation, security, planning and the right to live peacefully in the home one worked a lifetime to build.

Jamaica has spoken about squatting for decades. The next programme will be judged not by how firmly it is announced, but by whether the country can finally combine humanity with order — and make both visible on the ground.

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