One in four Jamaicans live in irregular settlements, and 40 percent of all occupied land on the island lacks any proof of ownership, according to findings from the NHT Strategic Mandate Review Commission’s 2017 report, a scale of informality that puts the country’s housing shortage in sharper terms than the more familiar unit-shortfall figures typically cited.
The commission’s findings sit inside a long-running debate about what the National Housing Trust’s actual mission should be. Some critics have argued the Trust functions increasingly as a savings vehicle, accumulating contributor funds rather than building housing at the pace its mandate implies. Defenders point to the Trust’s original design: from its inception, the NHT’s job was to provide access to financing for housing, not to construct dwellings directly.
That distinction matters for how the commission’s own numbers get read. A quarter of Jamaicans in irregular settlements and 40 percent of land without documented ownership is not primarily a financing gap; it is a land tenure and construction gap, the kind of problem a lender, however well-capitalised, cannot solve by itself. Programmes like the NHT’s Build on Own Land initiative, offering up to $7.5 million toward construction, help contributors who already hold title, but do nothing for the share of the population the commission’s own data says does not.
Whether the NHT’s mandate should expand beyond financing into land regularisation directly, or whether that work belongs with a different agency working alongside it, is the question the commission’s numbers leave unresolved. What they do settle is the scale: this is not a shortage measured in thousands of units, but in a meaningful share of the entire population living outside the formal system altogether.
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