Land Surveyed to Resettle Displaced Cooper’s Pen Families, PM Says

Pedro District, St Catherine, 14 September 2026

Families forced from their homes at Cooper’s Pen in Trelawny are a step closer to being resettled, with the Government now surveying land for them and working on relocation subsidies, Prime Minister Andrew Holness has said.

Mr Holness gave the update on Friday, 11 September, while handing over a three-bedroom house to a family in Pedro District, St Catherine. He said good progress had been made since he visited the Trelawny community, with several state bodies now involved.

A joint response

The Ministry of Housing, the Social Development Commission, the Ministry of Tourism through the Tourism Enhancement Fund, and the Jamaica Defence Force are working together on the case. The Prime Minister framed the effort as part of a broader attempt to deal with the irregular occupation of land and, where needed, to move people to new sites.

Surveying of land that could be offered to the first group of families is already under way. The next stage is expected to be civil works: building roads, preparing lots and putting in basic services.

Modular homes for hurricane victims

Separately, Mr Holness said more than 300 semi-permanent modular units are being deployed to people who have been assessed as in need, especially those whose houses were lost in the hurricane. Around 2,500 such units are in the country, and work is continuing on the foundations needed to put them in place.

The bigger picture: too few affordable homes

The Prime Minister tied the Cooper’s Pen situation to a wider shortfall of affordable housing for low-income Jamaicans. The difficulty, he argued, is not only access to financing but, above all, a lack of actual houses. The Government’s answer is to release land for development in order to increase supply.

He also said the scarcity is feeding the spread of informal settlements, noting that official studies show many people living on land illegally are contributors to the National Housing Trust.

What it means

For families living without secure tenure, the resettlement model now being prepared for Cooper’s Pen offers a signal of how the state may handle similar cases elsewhere. For NHT contributors still waiting to buy, the admission that supply, rather than money alone, is the bottleneck underlines why the pace of land release and construction will matter most in the months ahead.