Squatting pays off for St Andrew and St Catherine squatters

Residents of four informal settlements in St. Catherine and St. Andrew are to benefit from regularisation of their housing developments.

The Government will be upgrading these properties at an estimated cost of $12.5 million.

This follows Cabinet’s approval of the compulsory acquisition and improvement of the four privately owned parcels of land.

Details were provided by Minister of Education, Youth and Information, Senator the Hon. Ruel Reid, at a post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House on February 22.

“These parcels of land will be improved to regularise the settlement arrangements that currently exist, because there are persons, over time, who may have been squatting on these parcels of land, and the Government now has to move in to (formalise) the situation in those areas,” he told JIS News.

He informed that the Government will put in proper infrastructure and facilitate legal ownership of the lands.

The specific areas to be developed are Lot R, 140 Sydenham, St Catherine; part of 81 St. Johns Road, St Catherine; part of 12 Cedar Valley Road, St Andrew; and parts of 6 Cedar Valley Road, St Andrew.

In the meantime, Cabinet also approved the transfer of 12 parcels of land and industrial estates previously under the purview of the defunct Jamaica Industrial Development Corporation (JIDC) to the Factories Corporation of Jamaica (FCJ).

– By Alecia Smith, JIS website

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