Developer urges NHT to spend more on inner-city housing
Published:Wednesday | July 2, 2025 | 9:42 AM
Real estate developer Michael Lake wants the National Housing Trust, NHT, to do more for the transformation of the inner-city communities of Kingston.
Lake, a former chairman of the Jamaica Developers Association, JDA, said the state housing agency should procure unused properties for a land bank, and provide private developers with long-term financing for infrastructure works, such as roads, water and sewage, in order to keep down the cost of housing to low-income families.
“The way you transform a community is that you need a large enough parcel of land to create a new identity to that area. There are many depressed communities that could get some upliftment, but you need enough land to be able to do that,” said Lake.
“If the NHT could lead the way with those land acquisitions and do joint ventures with developers, I think it’s something that would be certainly helpful in transforming the urban texture,” Lake said during a JDA webinar.
Lawyer John Leiba said the cost of infrastructure runs to about 25 per cent of the total development. Financing from NHT would serve to reduce the price of housing to buyers and result in more houses being built in Kingston rather than in St Catherine, Leiba reasoned.
The agency is provider of affordable housing at rates cheaper than the private market. Its dealings are financed from a housing fund that has been built over decades from the mandatory contributions of employees and employers.
“We can’t keep building greenfield sites way out of town, and people having to spend hours on the highway to come back into Kingston. We need to get the urban areas redeveloped, without the gentrification that would take place by uprooting the people, some of whom are squatting in some areas. Consideration would have to be given as to how you accommodate all strata of society within the large tracts that you put together,” the lawyer said.
Brian Saunders, senior general manager of construction and development at the NHT, said the trust has programmes in which it partners with developers and landowners to build housing units in the capital city, but there were challenges identifying suitable lands.
“The ability to find large or reasonable tracts of land across the island is getting smaller because of the extent to which development is taking place currently,” Saunders said.
The housing agency is soon to roll out its new ‘small development partnership programme’ under which NHT will provide all the technical and financial support to landowners to convert their property into a housing development, Saunders said.
While acknowledging the value of such a programme, Lake said much larger developments were needed to address the housing stock in certain areas of the capital.
“There are areas within the city that the mortgage institutions don’t want to lend. So how do I build in an area when there’s no financing for a purchase of a house in that area? One has to be able to acquire enough of these small plots of land to make a difference, because dropping 20 units in an undesirable area is not making the change [when] I need 400 units in that area,” the developer said.
Lake also noted that financing for construction projects generally continues to be a challenge.
“From our experience, obtaining financing is becoming even more difficult,” said the developer. “Many of our financial institutions don’t necessarily have an appetite for development [but] if you want a car, that’s not a problem,” he said.