Jamaica property market history

The 1980s subjected Jamaica to an extraordinary sequence of shocks: Cold War realignment, IMF austerity, currency collapse, and the most destructive hurricane in the island’s recorded history. This edition of The Jamaica Decades Project examines how those forces remade the housing market, gutted public services, rewired construction standards, and drove a quarter-million Jamaicans abroad.

On 6 August 1962, Jamaica raised its flag for the first time as an independent nation. The decade that followed delivered the strongest sustained economic growth in the country’s modern history — and planted the seeds of crises that would take generations to resolve. This is the story of how Jamaica lived, built, worked and dreamed in its first ten years of self-rule.

On 6 August 1962, Jamaica raised its flag for the first time as an independent nation. The decade that followed delivered the strongest sustained economic growth in the country’s modern history — and planted the seeds of crises that would take generations to resolve. This is the story of how Jamaica lived, built, worked and dreamed in its first ten years of self-rule.