Editorial | Beyond Coopers Pen

The heart-wrenching Coopers Pen affair, in which dozens of homes that illegally occupied private land were demolished by the property’s owner, wasn’t a singular matter.

Variations of this issue have played out many times. It will happen again.

In that sense, Coopers Pen, Trelawny is a metaphor for the crisis of land/property ownership in Jamaica and the social and economic disparities it helps to breed. It is a signal, too, of the urgency, and depth of attention, that this issue demands.

However, it is another of those issues that won’t easily be solved by any administration on its own. If it is to surmount the obstacles of vested interests, the strategy by which it will be affected will require political consensus and, therefore, it has to be removed from partisan hustings.

The land at Coopers Pen, or more specifically the areas called Orange Grove and Florence Hall, was at the centre of a long-running legal squabble before last week’s dramatic development that left scores of people without shelter and handed the Holness administration an immediate political liability.

In 2007, the property’s owner, New Falmouth Resorts, and New Falmouth’s chairman and CEO, James Chisholm, went to court seeking the eviction of 99 families. New Falmouth said it had attempted for years to get the squatters to leave, even asking the government for support. The occupants, seemingly with support from the then Housing Agency of Jamaica (HAJ), had formed the Coopers Pen Provident Society, which, ultimately unsuccessfully, attempted to buy the nine acres of land.

In 2010, Mr Justice McIntosh issued an injunction restraining the occupiers of the land, who had claimed property rights via adverse possession, from undertaking any further construction. Further, Justice McIntosh ordered the defendants to demolish and remove their structures and that each pay New Falmouth J$50,000 in damages for trespass and wrongful occupation of the land.

INJUNCTIVE RELIEF

In early 2012, lawyers for the occupants/HAJ sought injunctive relief against New Falmouth, as well as a stay of execution, which Justice McIntosh ultimately denied.

Soon after, Omar Davies, the housing minister, exercising powers under the Housing Act, declared the disputed section of the Coopers Pen land an “improvement area”. It would be acquired by the government for development and the enhancement of housing conditions.

This was the backdrop against which Dr Davies sought a declaration that he was acting in accordance with the legislation and to prevent New Falmouth from otherwise disposing of, or doing anything with, the land. This new development was before Justice Lennox Campbell, who ruled against the government, arguing that conditions at Coopers Pen did not satisfy the threshold of the Housing Act.

Justice Campbell essentially saw the move as an attempt to achieve through the back door what was not accomplished in the earlier case on the same set of facts. In the circumstance, the government’s action would wrongly deprive New Falmouth of its constitutional right to its property.

Beyond the legal arguments in this matter, Coopers Pen has to be viewed against the backdrop of the estimated one-third of Jamaica’s population who live in squatter or informal settlements, the deficit of 150,000 homes, and probably higher, if measured by real, effective demand. Add to this the tens of thousands of people who occupy “family land”, which can’t be collateralised because they don’t hold titles.

These features are outcomes of Jamaica’s history, as is the yearning for land ownership. It is what causes people, as was revealed in 2022 in Clifton, St Catherine, to give good cash to people for land that the sellers don’t own. At Clifton, it was the government’s Sugar Company Holdings that demolished the homes, although residents were promised alternative land.

HIGHEST PROPORTION

Late last year, in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness addressed the question of squatting in Westmoreland, the parish with perhaps the highest proportion of squatting and informal settlements in Jamaica. Westmoreland’s history of extensive sugar plantations partially explains that characteristic.

In Westmoreland, Prime Minister Holness promised new approaches to the squatter problem. However, there has been as yet no great clarity on his administration’s proposals, except for his recent announcement that government agencies that own land have been ordered to release their inventory, ostensibly for development. The prime minister also said there will be an acceleration of land-titling programmes.

The government faces real and significant hurdles.

Converting unregistered, informal, or Crown land into registered indefeasible titles under the Torrens system, such as that used in Jamaica, can be a tedious and expensive undertaking. Moreover, since the collapse of the 1990s Operation PRIDE quasi-co-operative programme, there has been no comparable initiative to transfer substantial portions of land to significant numbers of people.

Operation PRIDE had real weaknesses in execution, which might have been fixed. But the initiative became an object of partisan political derision.

As Coopers Pen reminds us, land ownership and people’s sense of social dispossession run deep. This is not confined to political party affiliation.

A comprehensive assault on this crisis will require the expenditure of large amounts of political capital, which neither of the two major parties will want to spend on its own. Which is why The Gleaner insists that consensus be developed around a few specific projects that are taken out of the political arena, allowing the government to go hell for leather in their implementation.