Last week, twenty-five houses and informal structures in Cooper’s Pen, Trelawny, were flattened during a pre-dawn demolition exercise executed with heavy machinery and tactical police support. Many of the occupants had moved into the area, having found work during nearby large-scale hotel construction decades ago. Forty families were left displaced, drawing condemnation from angry Jamaicans on humanitarian grounds.
Before the bulldozers assaulted the buildings and personal belongings, able-bodied men in the community were carted off and placed into police safekeeping, leaving only the women and children to contend with the onslaught.
Months ago, in West Albion, St Thomas, occupied homes in another informal settlement were similarly levelled by authorities, leaving multiple families homeless and triggering public debate regarding humanitarian safeguards and consultation prior to state action.
Two years ago, on Orange Street, Downtown Kingston, dozens of individuals were displaced after tractors and bulldozers wrecked a squatter community inside a long-abandoned commercial building previously owned by the power utility. Settlers reported losing core personal belongings after being given brief vacation notices.
In 2022, small farmers occupying and working arable land in Bernard Lodge, St Catherine, were uprooted in a state-led demolition exercise which drew strong criticism from human rights groups and political opposition figures who cited a lack of humane consultation and adequate notice for vulnerable families.
On each occasion, the government, which is tasked to provide affordable housing solutions for the vulnerable population, arrives on the back end to commiserate, soothe wrinkles and feign regret over the rubble.
Nearly one million Jamaicans currently live in informal or squatter settlements across the country. This translates to roughly a third of the total population living without legal rights to the land on which they reside.
Landlessness in Jamaica has been an ongoing crisis since the TransAtlantic Slave Trade. At Emancipation in 1838, virtually 100% of the newly freed population, numbering over 310,000 formerly enslaved Black Jamaicans, started their life of freedom completely landless.
While the white elites and the Crown retained ownership of the island’s property, freed individuals were left to fend for themselves with no access or right to property. A few gradually acquired small plots over time by pooling funds and, with massive church support, established independent “free villages”.
Missionaries from non-conformist churches like the Baptist, Moravian, Methodist, and Presbyterian helped free people escape plantation control. The missionaries bought large tracts of land, split them into small plots, and sold them to ex-slaves. This allowed some Black Jamaicans to own property and build independent communities and grow their own food.
Among the landless are persons who have deep roots in the rural parts of the island but who migrated to urban ghettos in droves, especially within the past 60 years, to seek work in the construction boom or to find live-in jobs in upscale communities.
Generations of these rural-urban migrants live in squatter settlements, mainly on privately owned lands on the fringes of commercial centres.
In 1976, then Prime Minister Michael Manley established the National Housing Trust (NHT) to address the troubling issue of landlessness among the nation’s working poor.
The Trust was expected to address the dire housing deficit by pooling worker and employer contributions to finance, build, and distribute affordable housing solutions, provide low-interest mortgages, and partner with private developers or small landowners to scale up property ownership.
Over its 50-year history, the agency has achieved mixed success in its mandate. It has financed or constructed over 300,000 homes. However, policy reviews note that it struggles to fully bridge a persistent national housing deficit and often fails to adequately target the lowest-income earners.
While the NHT continues to fall short of its mandate, the government has been drawing billions from funds hard-working employees and their bosses contribute to its coffers in order to stop gaps in the national budget.
In recent years, there seems to be a strategic effort to evict and demolish informal and squatter settlements from prime locations. Families with no land rights are being uprooted mainly due to private land disputes, but a number of the cases have been linked to the government’s development plans or spurious environmental safety concerns.
Persons evicted from these informal or squatter settlements frequently struggle to reintegrate into the society because formal social safety nets and low-income housing are perpetually scarce.
Displaced families typically rely on moving to other informal settlements or doubling up with relatives in overcrowded tenement yards.
Dense, unmapped networks of makeshift housing stacked in overcrowded areas complicate law enforcement efforts. These conditions restrict police mobility, obscure suspect tracking, and foster environments where gangs embed themselves deeply into the zinc-lined lanes and on gully banks.
Politicians are well aware of the disturbing land dynamics. In the main, they exploit the loose arrangements during their election campaigns by encouraging squatter settlements, as these informal communities provide unlimited numbers of votes at a single address.
Squatters are always willing to deck out in party colours, board campaign buses and cram conference halls at crucial times. But, once seated in Gordon House, the politicians who victimised the vulnerable pay scant regard to the worsening crisis they injected with steroids.
The raging Cooper’s Pen debate has pointed to existing legislation such as the Compulsory Land Acquisition Act or the Local Improvement Community Improvement Act of 1977, which the government could utilise to halt demolitions and secure and regularise some of these communities without disenfranchising private property owners.
The time has come for Jamaica to frontally address this centuries-old land charade it has fathered and fostered. Until this untenable situation which was foisted upon this nation at Emancipation is firmly, forcefully and finally fixed, we must brace for more demolitions, displacements, broken hearts and the continued expansion of informal, lawless ghettos and the tumultuous disorder that comes with them.