Kingstons Building Boom Is Outrunning Its Water Pipes. An Editorial Fix

Jamaica has relaxed density rules over the past decade, producing a genuine boom in high-rise construction in Kingston and other towns. Water infrastructure has not kept pace with it, according to a Gleaner editorial that called for a specific, concrete fix: mandating rainwater harvesting facilities in new high-density developments.

The National Water Commission is responding with real capital spending. A US$92 million scheme financed, built and operated by a consortium led by French firm VINCI Construction and Capital Infrastructure Group, under a 23-year take-or-pay concession, is meant to add 15 million gallons of water a day to the Kingston, St Andrew, Portmore and Spanish Town corridor, an area that was short 12.5 million gallons a day relative to demand during the 2022 drought, the worst on record. Separately, the NWC is building 68 kilometres of cast-iron pipeline, distributed across 130 kilometres of route, to move 35 million gallons a day from treatment plants on the Queen of Spain and Martha Brae rivers in Trelawny to towns across St James, Hanover and Westmoreland, at a cost of €144 million.

The editorials specific ask is narrower than the mega-projects: new high-rise buildings should be required to install rainwater collection facilities as a condition of approval. It is unlikely such systems could meet a buildings entire water demand on their own, the Gleaner acknowledged, but even partial offset reduces pressure on a national system already straining to keep up with construction that regulators themselves approved.

The logic is straightforward: Jamaica granted developers the right to build taller and denser, which is exactly why water demand grew faster than pipes could follow. Requiring those same buildings to capture some of their own water is less an additional burden on developers than a belated correction to a density policy that was approved without a matching infrastructure mandate attached.

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