Relocating Coopers Pen Won’t Fix Anything. Jamaica Needs Both Political Parties at the Table

• Up to a third of Jamaicans live in irregular settlements
• There’s a backlog of 150,000 houses nationally
• Land reform has been attempted since Manley in the 1970s
• The Gleaner wants cross-party Vale Royal Talks reconvened

Prime Minister Andrew Holness’s pledge to relocate the Coopers Pen residents whose homes were demolished will address what he rightly called a humanitarian tragedy, a Gleaner editorial argued, but finding new housing for the roughly 99 people displaced from that one property is like the proverbial finger in the dyke. Government estimates put between 750,000 and 900,000 people, up to a third of the island’s population, in squatter or irregularly settled communities nationally, alongside a backlog of 150,000 houses.

The editorial’s central argument is about scale and time horizon, not sympathy for any one community. A problem of this size cannot be solved through traditional, incremental programmes, or without genuine political consensus, otherwise the fix will simply take decades, exactly what has already happened: Jamaica has pursued land reform and land titling in some form since the Michael Manley administration of the 1970s, more than half a century, with the crisis still measured in the hundreds of thousands of people today.

The Gleaner’s specific proposal is procedural rather than programmatic: urgently reconvene the Vale Royal Talks, the formal cross-party dialogue mechanism between government and opposition, on the reasoning that any solution at the necessary scale will require tensions with settled norms, including property rights themselves, that no single administration can push through alone without the other major party’s buy-in. A policy that shifts with every change of government, the editorial’s logic runs, cannot outlast the decades a problem this size actually requires to solve.

That argument sits uneasily next to the pattern this publication has documented repeatedly in 2026 alone: a Coopers Pen demolition carried out without adequate consultation, a lawsuit over detained residents, a company demolishing homes while itself delinquent on $26 million in property tax, a squatting policy framework that has existed on paper since 2006. Each individual failure has its own specific cause. The Gleaner’s editorial argues they share a common one: a half-century of governments treating landlessness as a series of local emergencies to manage rather than a single national problem large enough to demand the kind of sustained, cross-party commitment neither party has yet been willing to make.

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