Christopher Burgess | Land tenure and board houses

Lack of land tenure remains a major handicap for over 200,000 families. According to Pearnel Charles Jr in 2020:

“People squat for so many reasons, primarily because they don’t have adequate alternatives or have not availed themselves of adequate alternatives. It becomes a generational handicap.”

Having title gives families confidence and legal rights and builds wealth. Where informality exists, poverty becomes generational, and families make fragile housing compromises that deepen vulnerability and shape how those structures fail during disasters.

As a result, people build board houses out of necessity. They often cost less than half of a block-and-steel home. Board houses can be moved when land tenure becomes precarious. This is particularly true in the western parishes that have the highest national rate of over 70 per cent of board houses. But why is this so?

The irony is striking. The west has long sustained Jamaica’s agricultural economy and public finances well. The West Indies Royal Commission (1946) described Westmoreland as:

“The most important sugar district … because of the abundant water supply, the manufacture is very cheap and owing to conditions of soil. The rum manufactured is of fine quality and brings good prices.”

The region’s historical prosperity was once driven by abundant water and fertile soils which made plantation estates wealthy. Today, that prosperity is driven by white-sand beaches and luxurious hotels. But through the passage of time, elite landowners and government entities – not the people who worked the land – were the major land holders. Today, over 10,000 acres of idle government lands exist in the island’s biggest sugar belt while hundreds of acres of family lands exist in the hilly interiors. Large government land holdings have not translated into secure land ownership for the people. The legacy is visible today with numerous informal settlements and the highest national rate of board houses. The root cause is not culture, as Charles insinuated, but a tedious and inconsistent land-regularisation process.

Regularisation has been slow and inconsistent across political administrations. Yet it remains achievable and fiscally sensible to expand the valuation roll to strengthen public revenues. The 2021 Systematic Land Registration Programme (SLRP) is more efficient that its predecessors. All that is missing to end landlessness in the west in the wake of Hurricane Melissa is scale and funding.

TEDIOUS TITLING

Obtaining a “squatter’s title” is straightforward but expensive for low-income households. The documents alone - survey diagram, valuation report, legal representation to prepare affidavits, and an application - can exceed J$450,000. The costs place formal titling beyond the priority and reach of most informal settlers. Past land-titling efforts should have made it clear that this process does not work at scale and can only achieve national results with a state-sponsored programme. This is why programmatic land titling, and not individual applications, is essential.

The Registration of Titles Act (RTA) in 1889 established a title-registration system that has strict requirements, secures property rights, and increases land value. However, approximately 45 per cent of land holdings are still left without titles.

Successive governments attempted regularisation and reform through programmes such as Land Settlement (1940s), Land Lease (1970s), Expand-A-Village (1980s), Operation PRIDE (1995), and Land Administration and Management Programme (LAMP) (2000). LAMP Phase 1 launched in 2000 by Robert Pickersgill, advanced the cadastral maps and GPS network across the island.

Prime Minister Bruce Golding outlined the obstacles of Phase 1 in October 2010 and set out on LAMP Phase 2, which was launched by Minister Robert Montague. But this, too, proved too slow, with the court proceedings and limited number of commissioned land surveyors. This failure led to the 2020 amendments to RTA.

REFORM WITHOUT SCALE

Reforms in RTA in 2020 were intended to fix LAMP’s shortcomings. LAMP’s slow uptake resulted in roughly 7,000 titles over more than a decade, and while it is still ongoing, it is moving at a snail’s pace. The amendments shifted land titling from an applicant-driven, adversarial, court-style process to government-led, block-based adjudication by committees of attorneys. While this approach works better — SLRP has issued over 12,500 titles in four years — it remains far too slow. Annual titling increased only marginally - from roughly 7,800 for the period 2014 to 2019 to about 8,500 titles per year for the period 2021 to 2025. At that pace, resolving landlessness for 200,000 families would take almost 30 years.

The critical bottlenecks are known and must be addressed: too few commissioned land surveyors and adjudication committees. Golding’s paper in 2010 worked out that the severe bottleneck rested with the limited numbers of commissioned land surveyors. Jamaica has a little over 100 CLS, and UTECH turns out about 15 surveying graduates annually, but some years, as few as three or five become commissioned. Let’s be straight. There are whispers of “gatekeeping” rather than objective examinations of attached land surveyors. Two proficient commissioned surveyors that “failed” their examinations up to 10 times with little reasonable explanations. We can solve this problem with transparency, and without foreigners.

With the prime minister holding the land portfolio, NLA which already has both authority and responsibility to declare adjudication areas, should be able to accelerate titling. The legislation already exists, but what is needed is a fully funded programme focused on achieving tens of thousands of households per year.

ENDING LANDLESSNESS

Hurricane Melissa presents an opportunity to address landlessness as a part of recovery. Rebuilding ideally demands secure land tenure so that families can build with confidence and legal rights. A pragmatic land titling rebuilding programme does not need perfection: 5,000 to 8,000 square feet service lots, basic graded road reservations, water-supply access, and avoidance of flood-prone areas are sufficient for a start to restore dignity and safety to families. Lots can be delivered for under J$400,000 per household, including hard and soft costs. Roads and drainage can be upgraded later.

For almost more than two centuries, land-tenure insecurity has entrenched poverty, weakened housing, and driven both urban migration and overseas migration. Regularisation must, therefore, be seen not only as land reform but as an investment in Jamaica’s human capital and economy. If Jamaica is serious about rebuilding smarter after Melissa, government-sponsored land titling must scale dramatically. For less than US$120 million — a fraction of the US$6.7 billion recovery envelope — landlessness in western Jamaica could finally be resolved.

Christopher Burgess, PhD, is a civil engineer, land developer, climate-change scientist, and the managing director of CEAC Solutions. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.