North Coast development

Jamaica’s real estate market has always been more than land, blocks and steel. It has been a story—woven from the…

There are places in the world where architecture, landscape, and human ambition collide to create something quietly extraordinary. Jamaica is…

Jamaica is in the middle of its largest hotel investment cycle in a generation, with several billion dollars of new resort and residential development at various stages of planning and construction. A look at the pipeline, the projects, the players, and the environmental and access questions they raise.

As Jamaica breaks ground on the US$1 billion Harmony Cove resort in Trelawny and a new wave of north coast investment accelerates, NEPA’s first Coral Reef Awareness Month puts the ecological stakes of the island’s development boom in sharp focus.

A new condition attached to major resort approvals in Trelawny and St Ann requires developers to provide physical public access corridors to the beach. It may be the most significant practical change in how Jamaica manages its coastline in a generation.

Heavy equipment has moved into the Mammee Bay watershed in St Ann, beginning preparatory earthworks for the China Harbour Engineering Company’s controversial mixed-use coastal development. Environmental groups say the process has bypassed meaningful community consultation.

The first quarter of 2014 saw formal announcements of hotel investment that, while years in the pipeline, represented a genuine shift in the pattern of post-2008 caution. Developers were moving again on north coast projects, and the planning system was being asked to process applications it had not seen the like of since before the financial crisis.

The first quarter of 2013 saw the publication of a national mangrove assessment that documented losses totalling hundreds of hectares over the preceding two decades. The report gave formal expression to what coastal communities had been observing informally: the mangrove forests that had once fringed much of Jamaica’s coastline were disappearing, and with them the storm protection, fisheries nursery habitat, and shoreline stability they had provided.

By the first quarter of 2012, the immediate post-financial crisis trough in Jamaica’s tourism sector was clearly behind it. Stopover arrivals were recovering, hotel occupancy was improving, and the investor caution that had frozen coastal development applications from 2009 to 2011 was beginning to ease. The challenge was to manage the returning investment in ways that did not repeat the coastal governance failures of the boom years.

The final quarter of 2008 was the quarter in which Jamaica’s coastal resort development boom ended. The financial crisis that had been building through the summer crystallised in September and October into a global credit freeze that cut off the financing Jamaica’s resort development projects depended on. The cranes stopped. The construction fences went up. The coast that the boom had been in the process of making was now the coast that Jamaica was left with.

The first quarter of 2007 brought heightened attention to what access advocates had been documenting for years: the systematic exclusion of the Jamaican public from the beaches fronting the island’s major all-inclusive resorts. The access corridor requirement that was supposed to guarantee a public right of way had become, in practice, an administrative fiction at most properties along the resort belt.

The first quarter of 2006 found Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency at a critical juncture. Established in 2000 as an institutional framework for integrated environmental management, NEPA was, in its sixth year, facing a development boom that exceeded the scale it had been designed to manage, with a capacity that had not grown proportionally and political pressures that consistently favoured investment approval over environmental caution.

The summer of 2005 saw Jamaica’s north coast resort development boom at a critical inflection. Application volumes were high, construction was active on multiple fronts, and the regulatory system was under pressure to approve quickly and ask questions later. The pattern of approvals being granted with conditions that were never enforced was already well established, and the scale of the boom was making it worse.

By the end of 2004, what had started as a resumption of post-millennial tourism investment had become a full-scale resort construction boom. The projects that had been in the planning stages for two to three years were now breaking ground, and the cumulative effect of multiple simultaneous construction starts on Jamaica’s north coast was beginning to register in both the environmental monitoring data and in community experience.

The first quarter of 2004 saw the unmistakable beginning of a new wave of coastal resort investment in Jamaica. The applications that had been filed and approved in 2001–2003 were moving into financing and construction planning stages, and the investment community was signalling confidence in Jamaica as a destination that could absorb significant new resort capacity.