The National Housing Trust will inject $18 billion into the Jamaican economy through housing developments in Clarendon over the next three and a half years, NHT board chairman Dr Nigel Clarke announced at a groundbreaking ceremony for 351 additional units in the Monymusk Country Estate Phase Two, according to the Gleaner. The Monymusk project is one of nine housing schemes planned for Clarendon by 2020.
Clarke also disclosed that the NHT plans to issue 8,500 mortgages this year for contributors buying homes either built by the Trust or on the open market, a scale that, if met, would represent a meaningful acceleration against the Trust’s more typical annual lending pace.
We are in the business of creating affordable housing solutions, Clarke said, framing homeownership as carrying weight beyond shelter itself. So many Jamaicans, though they may desire to, don’t have their own home, and, for the most part, we are a historically dispossessed people, so home ownership plays a significant role in the psychology of the Jamaican individual, he said, arguing that formal housing also improves social outcomes relative to the informal settlements it displaces.
The Monymusk development includes paved roads, proper drainage and space for recreational amenities, the kind of basic infrastructure that has historically distinguished formal NHT schemes from the informal settlements the Trust’s own critics say a meaningful share of its contributors still live in. Whether $18 billion actually closes that gap in Clarendon specifically, or simply moves the waiting list, will be visible in how many of the nine planned schemes are actually delivered by the 2020 target.
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