Christopher Burgess | No land, no resilience

There is a risk that the opportunity presented by Hurricane Melissa to address land tenure, fragile housing, and their wider social consequences will be missed. 

Jamaica Institution of Engineers’ post-Hurricane Melissa assessments suggest that informal housing was approximately 18 times more likely to suffer severe damage than formal housing. Despite the obvious connection between weak land tenure and fragility, there is insufficient funding from government for sustained regularisation and titling programmes. Weak land tenure affects more than 600,000 Jamaicans and over 700 settlements islandwide. 

Minister Robert Montague has argued that secure land titles and proper land mapping contribute to safer communities. If so, why are land titling and affordable housing not receiving greater priority?

Some will argue that quality is more important than quantity, but Melissa demonstrated that Jamaica faces deficits in both. The national affordable housing deficit remains more than 200,000 units. Will NaRRA be able to answer the call?

Hurricane Melissa destroyed approximately 30,000 homes, with housing losses of more than J$300 billion. Given that housing represented the largest share of the disaster losses, investing in affordable housing and regularisation are some of the most cost-effective resilience investments Jamaica can make.

These themes deserve policy action under the NaRRA Act.

REIMAGINING OPERATION PRIDE

‘Dead lef’ land — where property owners die without leaving a will — is a major barrier to land regularisation, according to the National Land Agency (NLA). What starts out as family land can end up with squatters. Reverend Ronald Thwaites’ pragmatic suggestion is allowing persons to appear before judges to apply for administration rather than to the usual statutory legal administrator that bogs down the process for many years. Family land is pervasive in rural areas and NaRRA can help families help themselves through targeted legislative reform. 

Sufficient government land exists for over 200,000 affordable homes. Operation PRIDE demonstrated that large-scale regularisation is possible, assisting more than 50,000 families despite administrative and infrastructure challenges. The lesson for NaRRA is to improve its execution and avoid repeating a housing strategy that underserves the most vulnerable. Jamaica can build on that experience using available government lands and more affordable infrastructure standards. The land exists; the challenge is to create a modern and more efficient version of Operation PRIDE through NaRRA. 

ECONOMICS OF REGULARISATION

It appears that the cost of dignity in secure tenure, and healthy communities is still expected to be borne by those least able to afford it. The Housing Agency of Jamaica (HAJ), formed in 2008, is responsible for settlement regularisation in its operating mandate, but lacks sufficient financial resources. While Operation PRIDE assisted thousands of families, a 2015 organisational assessment of the HAJ concluded that social housing drains “economically” viable greenfield and affordable housing projects. 

But there have been improvements in the legislation of regularisation under the Special Provisions Act (2020). This act offers a solution for long-term occupants, of 12+ years, to quickly obtain legal title, removing the delays and costs. Unfortunately, the HAJ has increasingly focused on greenfield developments, while the regularisation of existing communities has slowed dramatically.

Master-planned communities, for those that choose to be relocated rather than being regularised, may be another approach. Master-planned communities can be cheaper to service with adequate infrastructure and can provide a higher quality of life through better access to amenities, commerce, and social services. This compares favourably with the higher infrastructure costs often associated with regularisation projects. The ad hoc layout of many informal communities also makes roads and utilities more difficult to plan and service. Commercially, each lot in an informal community can cost up to J$3.5 million to provide roads, drainage, water and sanitation. But, in master-planned communities, that can drop to less than $2.5 million at scale in greenfield projects. The reality, however, is that many families will be reluctant to leave established communities where generations of relatives have farmed, have businesses, and are buried. 

There is also a trust deficit around land titling. Some long-term occupants do not see the value of formal title, even though it remains one of the strongest protections against displacement.

DIGITISE OR DELAY

Paper-based processes are notoriously slow. All it takes is for one set of drawings to go missing to delay a project by a few months and to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to reprint. Dr Rosemarie Brown of the HAJ correctly asks why we must submit these large reams and reams of paper in subdivision applications. Likewise, paper-based cadastral and titling systems create duplication, delay approvals, and increase costs. The NLA should continue reducing processing times through routine service improvements rather than relying heavily on expedited services.

Are private-sector professionals, contractors, and government institutions ready—both institutionally and financially—to undertake mass regularisation and affordable housing delivery? With housing production declining in the last 20 years, and the slow response to shelter post Melissa, I don’t think so. But NaRRA can address some of the underlying issues by strategically developing water and sewage facilities to enable mass affordable housing projects for the HAJ. Cross-government coordination could also benefit from NaRRA's ability to expedite approvals. 

Twenty years after eLandJamaica was created, people should not still be waiting weeks or months for routine land administration processes. While digitisation has improved access to information, there is a lot more to be done for subdivision approvals and coordination among the NLA, utilities, NEPA, and municipal corporations that remain fragmented. The entire process needs seamless digitisation and integration to speed up the delivery of affordable homes. Minister Marks’ portfolio could make the next leap from 2004 when the last major improvement was done. 

Jamaica suffers from a shortage of large-scale titling, affordable housing, and institutional urgency for regularisation. If NaRRA is serious about resilience, it must not ignore informality, but it must treat land tenure reform as a national resilience programme. 

Dr Christopher Burgess is a registered civil engineer, VP of engineering for the Jamaica Institution of Engineers, climate scientist, land developer, and managing director of CEAC Solutions. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com