NHT’s 50th Anniversary Church Service
Greetings
by
Dr the Most Honourable Andrew Holness ON, PC, MP
Prime Minister of Jamaica
at the
NHT’s 50th Anniversary Church Service
Webster Memorial United Church
on
April 19, 2026
______________________________________________________________
Good morning, church.
Pardon me while I get my sermon in order. This is a kind of audience that inspires you to preach because I know you will listen, and you all look so well. Thank you for coming out and supporting the NHT.
Allow me to do the formalities. I salute General Astor Carlyle. Forgive me, Reverend, but you know he has another capacity. Reverend Astor Carlyle, Senior Minister of the Webster Memorial United Church,
My friend, Senator Professor Floyd Morris, representing the Leader of the Opposition and Mrs Morris,
Mr Linval Freeman, Chairman. And I see the past chairman here and other members of the board of the National Housing Trust,
Mr Martin Miller, Managing Director and members of the executive and broader NHT family. Thank you for your service.
Members of the Webster Memorial United Church and other specially invited congregants,
Members of the media,
Jamaicans listening here at home and in the diaspora, it is a wonderful morning in Jamaica.
Today, we gather in a spirit of gratitude, reflection, and renewed purpose. We give thanks not only for 50 years of service by the National Housing Trust, but for what that service represents: security for families, dignity for citizens, and the steady construction of a nation one home, one community at a time, for several generations.
This anniversary is appropriately framed under the theme ” Building Communities, Housing Generations”, that is both a declaration of mission and a record of impact. For five decades, the NHT has stood as one of Jamaica’s most important institutions of social transformation, turning contributions into opportunity and policy into lived reality. Nehemiah 2:18, Let us rise up and build. So, they strengthen their hands for this good work; that’s the admonition this morning.
But anniversaries are not only moments to celebrate what has been done. There are moments to define what must be done because we meet at a time when Jamaica has faced one of its greatest tests in recent history. The recent hurricane did not merely damage infrastructure, it disrupted lives, displaced families, and exposed vulnerabilities that now we must confront with clarity and resolve. Entire communities were affected, homes were lost, roofs torn away. For many Jamaicans, the very foundation of their security, their homes were shaken and, in that moment, the question was not whether Jamaica would rebuild, the question was will we rebuild better? Not what we had before, but what we should have had. More importantly, what we could have. Would we rebuild quickly but weakly or would we rebuild deliberately but stronger? It is in answering that question that the National Housing Trust has assumed a central and defining role.
In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, the NHT moved decisively as an active agent of national recovery. A special disaster relief grant of up to $500,000 was made available to the most vulnerable: pensioners, low-income households, and those unable to take on additional debt. The NHT also procured 2,500 semi-permanent housing solutions at a cost of US$19 million for families who had lost their entire home. In addition, a hurricane relief loan of up to $3.5 million was introduced at concessional interest rates of just 2% enabling Jamaicans not only to repair, but to upgrade, to reinforce and to rebuild to higher standards of resilience.
These are real interventions deliver delivering real support to real people but even as the NHT responds to immediate needs, its role is far greater than recovery alone. It is about rebuilding Jamaica at scale. Today, NHT is managing, and in my script, it says a pipeline, but I’ve said to my script writers do not use the term pipeline. You can’t see what is in the pipeline. We have a train line; you’ll see what is on the track coming. We have a train line of over 41,000 housing solutions across the island that includes approximately 10,700 units under construction, nearly 6,000 at the contract stage, more than 11,500 in procurement and 11,600 in planning and design.
New developments such as Longville Meadows in Clarendon and Friendship Phase 2 in St Elizabeth together delivering over 2,800 housing solutions are already underway, and in the coming financial year alone, the NHT will invest approximately $50 billion in housing development alongside an additional $21 billion in subsidies to support affordability. That level of investment is ambitious but necessary because let us be clear, Jamaica’s housing challenge is a matter of supply.
For too long, we have approached housing primarily through the lens of access to financing for home buyers, but increasing loan limits without increasing supply only drives up prices. The real constraint has been land, infrastructure approvals, and construction capacity, and that is why the NHT is now shifting focus towards large scale master plan developments that can deliver housing at the scale Jamaica requires.
The next major development in this regard, the Greater Innswood Development will be led by the NHT as a model of integrated planning and execution. This is the direction in which Jamaica must go; not small, fragmented interventions, but coordinated large scale solutions, not just housing units but communities, not just small developments, individualized and incremental, but planning at scale, coordinated and integrated. Moreover, we must build with resilience in mind. That means stronger building standards. It means better land use planning. It means relocating development away from high-risk zones, and it means ensuring that every new home built today can withstand the realities of tomorrow. The NHT is central to that transformation, but just as important, the NHT is ensuring that this transformation is inclusive.
We are expanding access to those who serve and sustain our society: the teachers, nurses, firefighters, and members of our security forces, will now benefit from reduced mortgage rates, recognizing both their service and their need for stability. Young Jamaicans will also see increased opportunities. Twenty per cent of NHT housing solutions will now be reserved for persons under 35, this is double the previous allocation with up to $2 million available to assist with deposit. And for existing homeowners, access to improved financing has been accelerated ensuring that families can maintain, upgrade, and expand their homes more easily.
Housing is not an isolated sector. It is the foundation of a functioning society, and that is why the work of the NHT is so central, not only to recovery, but to Jamaica’s long-term development. As we reflect on 50 years, we must recognize that this institution has evolved from a housing provider into a national development engine. So, then friends, the question is, what will be the role of the NHT in the next 50 years? And that is my job to plan and to direct policy, so I jotted down a few thoughts about the next 50 years that I wanted to share with this very attentive audience.
Now, very quickly, Jamaica has what is described as a fairly moderate rate of urbanization. If you were to compare Jamaica with, let’s say, a country like Israel, Israel has about twice the landmass of Jamaica with about almost three times the population, and they have about 440 persons per square kilometre. Jamaica has 255 persons per square kilometre. Singapore is about the size of St James. They have about 8,000 persons per square kilometre in their country. Luxembourg, which is, again, a very small country, probably smaller than Singapore, is about 260 persons per square kilometre and Trinidad and Tobago is about 290 persons per square kilometre.
I introduced this variable for your consideration for you to contextualize Jamaica. Jamaica is not overpopulated. Relative to other countries in the world, we could take more people. The question then is where would we house them and how will we house them because the truth is we’re not housing the people we have now. The question to that is, why have we not been able to build out?
There are many answers. There are cultural issues, our economic circumstances; many issues, our planning and regulatory environment, but a large part of the challenge has been that we have allowed housing to take place organically. In other words, government’s intervention has not overtaken individual housing decision making. The NHT 50 years ago was an attempt to do this for government to intervene in the housing market and increase the pace of housing over and above informal housing decisions. Can you imagine a Jamaica where- I give you three scenarios, a youngster goes to university, graduates, has a good salary, renting for a few years and now wants to transition into owning their own home; there’s just simply not enough housing options for that person, so that person will probably remain in the rental market for a little while, probably much longer than they would want.
Let’s take the youngster who is living in the family home, an argument would’ve arisen and it’s no longer comfortable to live in that family home, they have to find somewhere to live. They can’t afford land, there is no housing solution that caters for their income bracket, they have to live. What is going to happen? Either they’re going to build a little shack on their family land or they’re going to go somewhere and let me just use the frank terms. I don’t mean to disrespect anyone but they’re going to squat and there are circumstances of persons who genuinely now have reached this point in their lifecycle where they have worked long enough, they have saved long enough, and they’re looking for a house, they’re ready to establish family, and when they get onto the housing market, the more of them that get into the housing market, the higher the price will be. So, they qualify for the NHT, they get the various loan products from the NHT, but the more of those persons that enter the market with the limited supply of housing stock, all that does is to drive up the price of the house and that has been the case for the last 50 years.
There have been occasions when we have caught up or have planned ahead. For example, Portmore would be an attempt in that regard. We need to build housing at scale, but we now face a challenge. In other words, we have taken most of the lands that we have that are the best and suitable land for building houses, and we have built on them already so the lands that we are now taking on, most of them are marginal and require high levels of investment in infrastructure to make them affordable and accessible and so that is the big challenge.
The next strategy for housing is that we have to increase urbanization. Now, I know when I say this, I can see the bells going off. Urbanization, such a bad thing and the usual critique you will hear, and I encourage persons to think before they criticize, think before they jump to a conclusion. Singapore is 100% urbanized, but if you were to compare the urban environment of Singapore to the environment of Jamaica, which would be better in terms of cleanliness and sanitation, in terms of efficiency and ease of movement, in terms of general productivity of the entire society.
Urbanization does not mean the destruction of the environment. Urbanization, in fact, means a proper plan to minimize the use of land space to preserve the untouched environment, and that is a way in which I would want Jamaicans to start to think about urbanization. The history of Kingston flows out of Port Royal. It is the destruction of Port Royal because of the earthquake that caused Kingston to evolve. It was not a planned city, and it will take this generation for the next 50 years to properly plan our urban spaces. The government has a strategy, and we are incrementally executing the strategy, but now we are going to go full force in the implementation of the strategy.
The first part of the strategy was to rebuild the urban centres of each parish. If you think about it, the design of the administrative governance of the country was that you have the country divided into parishes and then each parish would have an urban centre with the seat of the local government there and the provision of the urban services. What has happened to all of those urban centres? They are not able to carry the populations around them and provide the services in convenient and dignified ways. They’re all overcrowded, there’s no space for pedestrians to walk, you can’t find places for taxis to park; it’s all chaos so we have to rebuild.
We must rebuild all our urban spaces, and we have started. We’re doing that now in Morant Bay where we have provided a world class urban Centre, and it will take some time for that to be stood up properly, but we’re putting in the elements. Then we have moved over into Port Antonio, where the BoundBrook Centre is now being built. The hurricane has accelerated the process so now we’re going to tackle Black River and Falmouth, and we have plans for Negril and Savanna-la-Mar. Right across Jamaica, we’re going to rebuild the urban centres, and the objective of this is to increase national productivity and efficiency.
The recent traffic gridlock that we experienced is just a symptom of not just poorly planned infrastructure but aged infrastructure and infrastructure that simply cannot meet the demands being placed on it. We have made a commitment for 70,000 new houses, which we intend to deliver. The NHT as an obligation to deliver 41,000 of those. Once those are delivered, then we’re going to pivot and we’re going to start to now focus on infilling the existing communities that have been built 50 years ago. They need repair, the sewage plants are not working, the roads are in potholes, many of those houses we may have to knock them down and put up new structures there so the NHT has to help to support that process of infilling and redevelopment of existing communities, and that has to be the focus for the next 50 years if we’re going to make Jamaica the place of choice. Our infrastructure as it is, does not put us in good stead to be considered first world and competitive.
Thank you so much for being such a rapt audience attentively listening to what I’m saying, and I hope that my comments are appropriately understood and will be properly analyzed and not subject to some of the unthoughtful comments that people make on sometimes very deep and profound issues. Jamaica really needs to start to examine itself truly in terms of what we need and I’m seeing in the audience that there is great understanding.
God bless you and thank you. Congratulations to the NHT for 50 years.