Letter of the Day | Housing should be treated as a national emergency

THE EDITOR, Madam:

I am a visitor to Jamaica and I would like to throw some light on the housing problems here. Other nations have addressed this by compulsorily purchasing empty homes, taxing second homes, banning foreign ownership of homes, and adopting unorthodox house-building methods, such as using 3D-printed liquid concrete, prefabricated flat-pack homes, and shipping-container conversions; through rapid vocational builder-training programmes, raising the status of vocational qualifications, building new towns, and encouraging self-build projects.

Currently, new homes are overpriced and poorly made as a result of demand outstripping supply. If it is a national emergency, then conscription must be enacted to create a professionally supervised, on-the-job-trained army of construction workers to build, build, build, along with supporting infrastructure in dedicated zones, properly planned using computer prediction with drone and satellite mapping.

If Jamaica does not do this, it will continually lose its young people abroad, there will be no young families, and the birth rate will continue to fall, leaving the country at the mercy of foreign powers who will use visa restrictions to dictate foreign policy, as US President Donald Trump has done to relations between Cuba and Jamaica.

It has to be Jamaica first, with an end to wealth disparity and personal greed, or it will die very, very slowly!

IAN BROWN

Middlesex, United Kingdom