A 75-year-old wood sculptor vowed to fight his eviction from Jacob Taylor Beach. A Supreme Court injunction has now paused the removal, with a full hearing set for October 6.

Relocating Coopers Pen residents helps 99 people. A Gleaner editorial argues Jamaica’s real squatting crisis, up to a third of the population, needs the kind of cross-party commitment no government has sustained in 50 years.

A demolition in Coopers Pen revived Jamaica’s squatting debate. But the policy framework to fix it has existed since 2006, and post-Melissa data shows informal housing was 18 times more likely to be destroyed.

The company that demolished homes in Coopers Pen owes six years of unpaid property tax on the same land, past the five-year threshold that can trigger forfeiture to the Crown.

After the Coopers Pen demolitions, Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship president Helene Coley Nicholson urged a non-partisan national land policy, emergency help for displaced families, and an end to politicians enabling squatting for partisan gain.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness says the Government will build a programme to formalise irregular settlements and prevent new squatting, following the Cooper’s Pen demolitions.

The Jamaica Evangelical Alliance condemned the demolition of at least 20 houses at Cooper’s Pen, Trelawny, as inhumane, saying the State failed to provide alternative housing or shelter before displacing residents.

US churches are turning underused land into housing under new YIGBY laws in California, Florida and Virginia. Jamaican churches hold the same kind of land, just losing it to squatters instead of building on it.

Kingston, Jamaica, 30 June 2026. You saved for years. You purchased land back home. You left Jamaica for work, intending to return…

Kingston, Jamaica, 30 June 2026. There is a clock running on your land, and most Jamaican landowners do not know it has…