Gareth Manning, Sunday Gleaner Reporter

A section of Norwood, St. James known, as 'Gulf'.-Monique Heoburn

Despite a move by the National Housing Trust (NHT) to fit booming north-coast resort towns with additional housing to match current tourism expansion in those areas, some stakeholders say the houses will not be enough to meet the demand of workers flocking to the areas.

The NHT says it will be putting in 3,416 houses in 10 of its newest housing schemes across the parishes of St. James, Trelawny, St. Ann and St. Mary between 2008 and 2010 when the tourism expansion programme is completed. The project is to be a joint-venture programme with interested developers, but will give employers and hotels an opportunity to work with the NHT so they can provide their staff with housing benefits.

But speaking at a Gleaner Editor's Forum recently, real estate developer and chairman of the St. James Parish Development Committee (PDC), Mark Kerr- Jarrett, said the houses to be provided by NHT were insufficient to meet the demand arising from the expansion project. The expansion programme is expected to yield some 12,000 hotel rooms and 15,000 direct jobs by 2010.

"It seems to me that there isn't a holistic plan that's being done. Everybody seems to be running for the foreign investment but not looking at the social infrastructure and the physical infrastructure that's going to be needed in order to support these investments," he said.

Demand

He is purporting that at least 15,000 houses will be needed to satisfy the demand between Negril and Trelawny and about 20,000 more units to satisfy demand nationally.

His argument is supported by a study undertaken and published by the Planning Institute of Jamaica in 2005 which stated that the country needed close to 40,000 houses by 2011. The greatest number, it noted, would be needed in the parishes of St. James, Trelawny, St. Ann and Westmoreland.

Kerr-Jarrett noted that land space is available in St. James for housing but it was up to the Government to find ways, whether through partnership with the private sector or otherwise, to provide the housing.

He chided the Government for its consistent failure to provide the necessary support for large investment projects because of its incapacity to build strong communication linkages between its ministries and agencies.

"Sometimes the NHT doesn't even know the hotel is going up until it reads it in the paper," he remarked.

He added that it also failed to properly implement and manage its own housing plans, pointing to the failed attempts to provide housing under Operation Pride in St. James. The plan, he said, was massacred when the Government abandoned the Retirement Development Trust intended for the community of Retirement in the parish. As a result, the parish is now suffering from a housing deficiency particularly for low- and middle-income earners.

"Three thousand rooms in 2010 isn't going to do us any good today because the hotels are opening and some have already opened and there are already complaints of squatting because of people coming in to work," he said.

His arguments are being strongly supported by Mayor of Falmouth Jonathan Bartley who added that as result of the absence of low-income housing, squatting in Falmouth was in the region of 80 per cent of residents.

Chairman of community-based organisation COMAND in Montego Bay, Owen Dave Allen, also supported Kerr-Jarrett's perspective, but he said before new houses are introduced, existing settlements need to be regularised and fitted with the necessary infrastructure to make them more habitable for people living there and for others looking for housing.

"There are over 4,000 housing solutions in Norwood (St. James), that lack infrastructure and therefore the urgency must come to bear and deal with that matter," he said, pointing out that this was also a sound solution to the crime problem plaguing St. James.

Partnership

But while Kerr-Jarrett is pushing for a partnership between government and private developers to solve the housing problem, he points out that the burden of development cannot be left up to the private sector alone. He notes that there is even further difficulty with investing in low-income housing because there is no guaranteed profit.

"If you're gonna do real inner-city housing, it has to be subsidised and it has to be subsidised by taxes. Because if a private developer comes in and he has to borrow money, if he doesn't make back all the money and some profit, then he can't keep going and he can't pay back his loan," he said.