3:00 am wake-up call - Coopers Pen demolition exposes Jamaica's squatter policy gap

A bailiff and a strong police contingent oversaw the hours-long operation, during which a demolition crew using two excavators, sledgehammers and pickaxes razed structures while residents scrambled to recover belongings.

• The demolition began in the pre-dawn hours — residents variously reported it starting around 3:00 a.m. — and was carried out with heavy-duty equipment including two excavators; residents say no prior notice to vacate was served.
• According to Nationwide News, the land — known as the Orange Grove property — is owned by New Falmouth Resorts Limited, whose chairman James Chisholm reportedly filed a lawsuit against some 99 occupants without permission as far back as 2007.
• Nationwide News reports that in 2010, Supreme Court Justice Donald McIntosh ruled in favour of New Falmouth Resorts, ordering recovery of possession and awarding $50,000 in damages against each defendant for trespassing.
• Nationwide News further reports that subsequent government attempts to block evictions — including a declared 'improvement area' under the Housing Act and later court interventions — were rejected by the courts, with the Court of Appeal upholding rulings against the government in May 2016.
• MP Tova Hamilton said a caveat had been lodged on the title and that the matter involved what she described as an equitable interest, and said she had contacted Prime Minister Andrew Holness to explore how the government might now help resolve the issue.
• The demolition team warned residents it would return in the coming weeks to demolish the remaining approximately 40 houses still standing on the property, leaving those occupants deeply anxious.

Scores of families — estimates across reports range from more than 20 to more than 30 households — are now without shelter, many of them already financially strained from repairs after Hurricane Melissa and facing imminent school-year costs. The roughly 40 households still standing face the credible threat of a second demolition wave in the weeks ahead, leaving an entire community in a state of prolonged uncertainty.

In the immediate term, MP Hamilton has acknowledged the Government can offer no short-term housing solution and urged displaced residents to seek temporary shelter with family. 

That frank admission underscores a wider gap in Jamaica's squatter-settlement policy: the Squatter Management Unit has completed its National Squatter Survey in most parishes but a formal National Squatter Management Policy and Implementation Plan is not yet in force, leaving communities like Coopers Pen without a clear legal safety net when private landowners move to enforce decades-old court orders.

What to watch: • Whether the demolition team returns as warned to clear the remaining roughly 40 houses still standing on the Orange Grove property. • The response from Prime Minister Andrew Holness's Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation following MP Hamilton's direct appeal for government intervention to resolve the land issue. • Any move by the government to invoke the Housing Act to declare the area a development zone and acquire the property — as proposed by PNP caretaker Dennis Meadows — which would trigger a formal land-acquisition process.

"The court ordered an immediate recovery of possession and awarded New Falmouth Resorts $50,000 in damages against each of the approximately 99 defendants for trespassing — a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that reportedly underpins Tuesday's demolition."

— Nationwide News

Viewpoint: MP Tova Hamilton was unequivocal that this was a private-sector action, not a government operation — but her admission that authorities cannot offer displaced residents any immediate housing alternative raises a harder question: what exactly is the constituency MP for, if not to have anticipated and fought this crisis before the excavators arrived? She has escalated the matter to the Prime Minister, but residents spent Tuesday night arranging themselves among relatives while she searched for answers.

Viewpoint: PNP caretaker Meadows didn't just decry the demolition — he named a specific remedy: invoke the Housing Act, have the government purchase the Orange Grove property and subdivide it among current occupants. That proposal is notable precisely because it is the same legal mechanism the courts previously rejected when a PNP administration attempted it in 2012. Meadows is proposing a path his own party already tried and lost.

Viewpoint: At least some residents say a 2019 agreement to purchase nine acres from the landowner was struck and then went silent — no follow-up, no contract, no communication — before bulldozers appeared without notice. If that account holds, the demolition wasn't just legally backed enforcement; it may have severed an active, if informal, negotiation that residents reasonably relied upon.