NHT and private partner break ground on nine-billion-dollar Rozelle estate homes in St Thomas

ST THOMAS — A shovel-and-sod event has formally opened work on a large National Housing Trust-backed housing tract at Rozelle Estate, presented as fresh evidence of a push to grow regulated stock east of Kingston while leaning on private execution and bulk purchase guarantees.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who carries the housing-trust portfolio, shared the platform with trust chairman Lynval Freeman, managing director Martin Miller, St Thomas Western Member of Parliament James Robertson, Morant Bay Mayor Councillor Louis Chin, Baptist minister the Reverend Brenda Walker of the Yallahs circuit, New Roselle Properties chairman John Sinclair, other board members named from the dias including Sujay Boswell and Merl Donaldson, and agency heads from entities such as the Housing Agency of Jamaica and the Factories Corporation of Jamaica. Donetta Russell steered the order of service.

Addressing attendees after a prayer, Freeman said the mixed one- and two-bedroom programme should yield eight hundred and ninety-five apartments in roughly twenty-four to thirty-six months, with about six hundred and sixty earmarked for trust-assisted buyers and the balance marketed by the developer. He tied the scheme to the trust’s guaranteed purchase programme, pitched as a way for builders to move quickly while the NHT underwrites part of the inventory, and he reiterated an islandwide target north of forty-three thousand new starts alongside involvement in procuring about two thousand five hundred modular storm-relief units.

Holness priced the Rozelle phase at about nine point six billion Jamaican dollars across roughly one hundred and eighty-seven acres a short drive west of Morant Bay’s town centre. He argued upgraded south-coast highway corridors—water pipes, fibre ducts, refreshed power lines and drainage—had made the parcel bankable inside roughly half an hour of the capital, then contrasted five decades of modest trust throughput in the parish with the scale of this single tranche, which he said nears ten percent of all St Thomas solutions the NHT has supported since inception. He urged Sinclair’s team to harden designs against hurricane winds despite sea views, promoted the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority’s fast-track window for large resilience-aligned investments, floated modular pilots after heat issues surfaced elsewhere, and tossed out an illustrative two-bedroom ticket near seventeen million dollars while acknowledging cheaper rungs are still missing from the market.

Robertson welcomed Holness back to the parish, recalling Paul Bogle’s seven October eighteen sixty-five rising with figures he said he verified—four hundred lives lost, three hundred people detained, about one thousand homes razed—and casting fresh masonry as a reversal of old decline. Earlier, master of ceremonies Russell quoted an African proverb on shared progress: “If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together.” Russell also relayed former history teacher Ivadney Small’s recollection that Holness “walked with purpose” even as a schoolboy. Pupils from Roselle Primary and Infant School performed during national Education Week observances.