Jamaica
News - Real Estate - Projects
Source: Jamaica Gleaner, Gareth Manning, February 11, 2007
Stakeholders say 15,000 houses needed for tourism workers
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.
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