- Coopers Pen demolition reignited squatting debate
- Informal housing 18x more likely to suffer severe damage
- A squatter management unit has existed since 2006
- $37.8 million national survey already completed in 2022
The demolition of 20 houses in Coopers Pen, Trelawny, carried out by private developers with police assistance, prompted Prime Minister Andrew Holness to announce on August 17 that government would develop a programme to formalise and regularise irregularly settled communities and prevent further squatting. The announcement drew a pointed response from Gleaner commentator Peta-Gay Ferguson, who asked the question the announcement itself raised: what happened to the programme already under development for nearly two decades?
According to Jamaica’s own National Squatter Management Policy, a dedicated Squatter Management Unit was established in 2006 specifically to coordinate policy and action on squatting. By May 2022, government reported that the National Housing Trust had contributed $37.8 million toward a National Squatter Survey, producing a database with detailed information on hundreds of settlements. A second draft policy, stakeholder consultations, an implementation plan and a proposed budget all reportedly followed. Ferguson’s commentary asks, plainly, why Jamaicans were being told in 2026 that government would now develop a programme that appears to have already existed on paper for years.
The stakes of leaving that question unanswered sharpened considerably after Hurricane Melissa. Post-storm assessments by the Jamaica Institution of Engineers found informal housing was approximately 18 times more likely to suffer severe damage than formal housing, according to a separate Gleaner commentary by Christopher Burgess. Weak land tenure affects more than 600,000 Jamaicans across over 700 settlements islandwide, Burgess wrote, arguing that the connection between insecure tenure and physical fragility is obvious, and funding for sustained regularisation has not matched it.
Some of the legal tools already exist. The Special Provisions Act, passed in 2020, offers long-term occupants of 12 or more years a faster route to legal title, cutting through delays that used to make regularisation a multi-year process. But the Housing Agency of Jamaica, formed in 2008 with settlement regularisation as part of its mandate, has increasingly focused its resources on new greenfield developments instead, according to Burgess, with the actual regularisation of existing communities slowing rather than accelerating.
Holness has tried to draw a clear line publicly: squatting is wrong and should not be encouraged, but every Jamaican deserves equal access to land and housing, and any response has to avoid setting an unsustainable precedent. Government has committed to a full electronic land titling roll-out by 2027-2028. Whether that timeline, or the newly announced squatting programme, actually closes the gap between the policy Jamaica has had on paper since 2006 and the regularisation that has visibly slowed on the ground is the question Coopers Pen has now put back in front of the public.
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