By Ainsworth Morris
KINGSTON, Jamaica, (JIS) – Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, is encouraging more private developers to create small housing projects between five and 15 units and approach the National Housing Trust (NHT) for assistance and funding. Speaking at the official handover of keys to 14 new apartment owners at the NHT’s Vineyard Town Housing Development in Kingston, on July 1, Holness said this will assist the government with meeting the high demand for housing, while offering units at affordable costs to Jamaicans.
“I’d announced it two years ago – the small developers programme. I want to just put this back in the public domain. If you are a small developer or you have land and your development is a maximum of 50 rooms, then you can approach the NHT to assist you with the financing and guidance for the development process. The NHT will support you and carry you through the development process and provide the financing to do the development,” Holness said.
“And I’m encouraging persons who have land in areas like Vineyard Town and communities like this, approach the NHT as a small developer. Let us see how we can expand the infilling of many of these communities.” The prime minister also called on the small housing developers to tackle the supply side and do more work to scale, given the size of the island.
“What we need to be doing much more of, are interventions on the supply side. In other words, the challenge with housing in Jamaica is not demand. It’s not necessarily affordability. The challenge with housing is the scale of output, the supply side issues… Scale reduces the unit cost of each housing solution that you put on the market and that’s how the price comes down,” Holness said. “To put this in context, a supply side issue would be the difficulty of contractors working in crime-ridden communities. They prevent the output of homes, as was the case here in this development, so that’s a supply side issue.”
Prime Minister Holness reiterated that another supply side issue, which contractors continue to complain about, is not being able to find reliable skilled labourers.
“But the real supply challenge is that we are not building at scale… we are a small island, we think of things in a scale, that when you compare it to the rest of the world, it is not economical. We need to be building tens of thousands of houses each year. Not 2,000. We need to expand rapidly,” the prime minister said. The NHT has already been tasked with a huge scale of development with a five-year target of 70,000 housing solutions. On the other hand, he said two years have been lost to the COVID-19 pandemic and hurricane Beryl.
“It is important to note that of that 70,000, the NHT was tasked to do 42,000 units. By the end of 2025, the Housing Trust had recorded approximately 31,540 housing starts, and 21,166 completions, while issuing 67,000 mortgages for the financial year,” Prime Minister Holness added.
The Vineyard Town Housing Development comprises 14 studio apartment units across two sites in the Vineyard Town community of South Eastern St Andrew. The development includes eight units at 2A Central Avenue and six units at the neighbouring 7 Third Avenue, together with the necessary supporting infrastructure works.
Located approximately three kilometres northeast of downtown Kingston, the project provides quality, affordable housing in an established urban community.
There are social amenities, such as boundary walls with restricted access, potable water distribution system, electrical distribution infrastructure, common and communal areas lighting, storm water drainage system, central sewerage collection and treatment systems, paved parking area, landscaped communal space and a gazebo.
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