Dean Jones | Homes up. Jobs where?

Jamaica is building a new north coast. Thousands of homes are rising across St Mary, St Ann, Trelawny, St James, Hanover and Westmoreland. Gated communities are spreading, apartment developments are climbing and new supermarkets, plazas and service stations are following.

But one question is becoming harder to ignore. Where are all the jobs going?

MORE PEOPLE, MORE PRESSURE

The 2022 Census counted 773,875 people across those six northern and western parishes. Kingston and St Andrew combined had 672,904. That means the six parishes already contain about 101,000 more people than Kingston and St Andrew combined.

They are also becoming dramatically more urban. In 2011, the six parishes contained 548 urban enumeration districts. By 2022 that had risen to 1,053, an increase of about 92 per cent.

St Ann went from 99 urban districts to 219. Trelawny rose from 39 to 86. Hanover jumped from just 19 to 75. St James increased from 232 to 373, while Westmoreland more than doubled from 87 to 179.

The landscape is changing quickly and the building has not stopped.

THOUSANDS MORE HOMES

The National Housing Trust project pipeline gives only a partial glimpse of what is coming. In St Ann, Ridge Estate has 447 housing solutions, Bromley 775 and Minard Estate 492. That is 1,714 homes and lots across just three NHT projects.

Trelawny has another 2,176 through Dundee, Dry Valley and Windsor. Dry Valley alone contains 1,560 units. Hanover has 1,100 solutions planned at Point Resettlement and another 168 at Winchester. Westmoreland’s Negril Spot will contain 1,040 solutions, while Fontabelle adds another 355.

St James has 1,565 at Barrett Hall, 403 at Brookside Estate, 401 at The Estuary Phase 2, 217 at Adelphi and 180 at Comfort. St Mary has 360 at Galina, 60 serviced lots at Industry Pen and 40 homes at Non Such.

And that is only the NHT.

It does not capture the full private apartment, villa, subdivision and gated community boom around Ocho Rios, Drax Hall, Mammee Bay, Runaway Bay, Discovery Bay, Falmouth, Montego Bay and farther west.

The Urban Development Corporation added another significant number in June 2026 when it disclosed plans for approximately 1,500 to 2,000 additional homes across Mansfield, Chalky Hill and Malvern Park in St Ann.

Jamaica is not preparing for north coast growth. It is already happening.

THE TRAFFIC WARNING IS FLASHING

Traffic is the first visible symptom.

In March 2026, the Government announced major upgrades to the Drax Hall to Mammee Bay corridor, describing it as one of Jamaica’s fastest growing commercial areas and acknowledging that the existing road was coming under increasing pressure from development.

On March 19, plans were outlined for extensions to the North South Highway. The proposal would create a new interchange near Mammee Bay, with one highway branch running west towards Discovery Bay and another east towards Tower Isle in St Mary.

The stated aim is to divert traffic away from the increasingly congested north coast corridor. A further project would improve the existing road between Montego Bay and Drax Hall, including dual carriageway sections where required.

But wider roads cannot answer a deeper planning problem.

If thousands of homes are added while major employment remains concentrated elsewhere, Jamaica simply creates more journeys, more cars, more fuel use, more lost hours and eventually another road that needs widening.

JOBS EXIST, BUT WHAT KIND?

The north coast does have jobs. That is not the issue.

Tourism alone directly employs around 175,000 Jamaicans, according to the Ministry of Tourism in September 2026. The industry is also expanding, with the ministry saying Jamaica plans to add roughly 20,000 hotel rooms over the next 10 to 15 years, with around 5,000 already under construction.

That expansion will create employment. So will construction, restaurants, attractions, supermarkets, hardware stores, transport businesses and other supporting services.

But that is not the same as creating a diverse metropolitan economy.

Where are the major insurance operations, technology campuses, corporate headquarters, engineering consultancies, financial centres, government departments, legal and accounting hubs, regional medical centres, large back office operations, research centres and specialist colleges?

Montego Bay increasingly performs some of those functions. Much of the remaining north coast does not.

That leaves Jamaica vulnerable to building residential communities faster than it builds the employment ecosystem needed to sustain them.

We cannot keep measuring development by the number of roofs we put up. The real test is whether somebody can leave that house on Monday morning and find a serious career within reasonable travelling distance.

KINGSTON STILL CARRIES TOO MUCH

There is an older statistic that shows how deeply centralised Jamaica has been.

When the Government launched GovNet in June 2018, the first phase focused on Kingston, St Andrew and St Catherine because those three parishes contained approximately 80 per cent of government corporate offices.

The north coast came later in the rollout.

Eight years later, the housing map is changing faster than that old institutional geography. That matters because a country cannot decentralise its population while keeping too much of its higher value employment, administration and corporate decision making concentrated around the Corporate Area.

Eventually, the two will collide on the road.

Building another highway is useful, but it cannot be the entire economic strategy. If every solution involves moving people farther and faster to somewhere else, we have missed the bigger opportunity.

BUILD ECONOMIES WITH THE HOUSES

The answer is not to stop building. Jamaica needs housing. The answer is to build complete economic centres alongside it.

Drax Hall and Ocho Rios should be competing for professional offices, financial services, technology firms, government regional headquarters, education and healthcare investment.

Falmouth should be more than housing and tourism.

Lucea and the Negril corridor need broader economic activity as residential development expands.

St Mary needs employment growth that allows more residents to build careers without automatically looking west to Ocho Rios or south towards Kingston.

Planning permission for thousands of homes should trigger a much wider question than water, sewage and road access.

Where will these people work?

THERE IS STILL TIME

The north coast still has something Kingston increasingly does not. Room.

There is room for housing, commercial districts, offices, planned town centres and new economic centres. There is still space to decide what the next 20 years should look like.

That window will not remain open forever.

We have a chance to build the Jamaica we keep saying we want. But houses cannot come first and jobs, transport and public services ten years later. That is not planning. That is catching up.

The houses are coming. The people are coming. The traffic is already here.

The jobs need to come too.

- Dean Jones is founder of Jamaica Homes. This article was first published by Jamaica Homes News at jamaica-homes.com. Email feedback to office@jamaica-homes.com and columns@gleanerjm.com. ONLINE ONLY COMMENTARY.