Today, we publish the first of 15 stories on the nominees for the Jamaica Observer Business Leader Corporate Award. The award presentation and announcement of the Business Leader Corporate will take place on Sunday, December 2 at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston.

West Indies Home Contractors Ltd (WIHCON) has earned its place within the pantheon of corporate greatness many times over.

With a history — stretching back to pre-Independence Jamaica — marked by a relentless pursuit of housing solutions for the emerging middle class, WIHCON makes an irresistible case for nomination for the Jamaica Observer Business Leader Corporate Award.

This company began casting its prodigious shadow over the island’s housing sector in 1958.

That year, as its first building blocks began to rise from the ground, home ownership suddenly became a realistic goal for urban dwelling civil servants and other members of the country’s inchoate middle class.

Like most innovative ideas, the Mona Heights development in St Andrew attracted its fair share of controversy, and had no shortage of sceptics. After all, the 680-unit housing community built on sparing lots with conterminous boundaries had no visual or architectural parallels within 1950s Jamaica.

“There was resistance to the project in the media,” says Judith Bruce, an executive of WIHCON who has undertaken extensive research into the history of this firm. “People thought Mona Heights was going to be a ghetto. They thought the development could not work because of the closeness of the houses. They felt that residents would always be disturbing each other and would be constantly at each other’s throat.”

Back in 1958, Bruce was much too young to comprehend the seismic shift in the economics, culture and psychology of homeownership that her father Isaac Matalon, and her uncles, including Moses and Mayer, were about to unleash on post-Independence Jamaica when they teamed up with the Government and a Puerto Rican company to create Mona Heights.

For its part, the Norman Manley-led Government contributed Crown lands for the project, while the Puerto Ricans brought with them cutting-edge technology that promised to cut construction time and cost.

The £2,900 price tag at which each of the three-bedroom Mona units hit the market, and mortgage funding from Standard Life brought decent housing on a mass scale within the grasp of aspirant middle class Jamaicans.

“This was the first opportunity for civil servants to buy a house of any consequence without having to build it themselves,” notes Bruce. “Lots of civil servants bought houses in Mona.”

The Mona Heights template was dusted off and tweaked even before Independence when Premier Norman Manley sought private partnership to bring to fruition his own vision for an ambitious lower middle-income community on bush lands owned by the Crown at the easterly tip of Kingston.

The public/private sector symbiosis that had created Mona was set in motion again, with Government land being used to seed the project in the east.

At a starting price of £1,525, the 1,800 two- and three-bedroom houses that made up the Harbour View community were intended to bring within the exclusive but now expanding club of homeownership, a lower income bracket of Jamaicans than those who occupied the homes in Mona.

“The Government was paid back for the land as the houses were bought by customers,” explains Bruce.

If the success of the Mona project was far-reaching in its demonstration effect, Harbour View was the metaphorical proof that lightning can indeed strike twice and stiffened the resolve of the builders to press on with their transformative investments.

So over the next few years, WIHCON went on a frenetic housing and community development drive that had no precedence within pre- or post-Independence Jamaica.

After 50 years of continuous construction, the results are nothing short of breathtaking in scope and impact.

Here is the single, stupendous number that sums it all up: more than 46,000 houses (including 6,000 elsewhere within the Caribbean) and counting.

Peter Melhado, the chairman of WIHCON, points to the quality of the building systems and material used in the housing construction as an important factor in the long-term economic return on these units.

“Property values in these communities continue to appreciate as they have been built using sound engineering principles with infrastructure designs that have withstood the tropical weather conditions,” says Melhado.

There is no doubt that over time, WIHCON’s impact on the country’s housing and community development has reached well beyond its own visionary investments and achievements.

First, there was the demonstration effect: the proof that there was money to be made in the building of mass housing settlements, and that this was indeed a cost-effective solution to the pent-up housing demand, while inducing the flow of capital into construction from multiple sources.

Combined with the developers who followed its lead, WIHCON permanently redefined the housing landscape within Jamaica, and perhaps more critically, allowed the masses to begin believing that homeownership beyond the ramshackle settlements to which many of them had been relegated was within their reach.

Along the way, thousands of otherwise idle hands have been put to constructive use in ways that are now very hard to measure. The impact of the perennial construction activities would have been felt directly by masons and carpenters, while the myriad small businesses that would have sprung up to meet the demands of the builders would have been the collateral beneficiaries: hardware retailers and wholesalers, trucking companies, block manufacturing plants, and so on.

Yet this company upscaled the template it developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s to fit a 1990s project with which its corporate identity eventually became synonymous: the Greater Portmore housing scheme in St Catherine.

Despite WIHCON’s prolific building activities, the gap between Jamaica’s housing needs and construction remained stubbornly high. It was a cause of much political hand wringing.

In 1989, Michael Manley, the son of premier Norman Manley with whom the WIHCON directors had collaborated to expand the housing stock in the late 1950s and early 1960s, became prime minister again after his eight-year stint in the 1970s.

In 1991, the WIHCON directors had an idea for a mass community settlement in Portmore, this time more targeted at the unmet housing needs within the working class end of the market.

Mayer Matalon, at the time WIHCON’s chairman, adroitly negotiated with the Jamaican Government, Mexico and Venezuela to tap into development funding provided under the San Jose Accord through which the island was able to access oil from Venezuela at below world market rate.

The image of throngs of Jamaicans lining the road leading to the National Arena for a chance to sign up for one of the 10,000 housing units being built in a community called Greater Portmore was a poignant reminder of the shocking scale of the housing needs within the country.

WIHCON built each 200-square-foot unit — euphemistically referred to as a quad because four units had conterminous walls — with the specific intention of creating a foundation for the owner to expand on in the future when affordability allowed.

The price of each unit started at $121,000.

“The idea was to give people a base that they could later expand,” notes Bruce. “The mortgages were less than $4,000 per month.”

That vision could not be more prescient: Greater Portmore is today one of Jamaica’s most talked-about architectural mosaics — notorious for the extent to which homeowners have whimsically converted their 200-square-foot quad into virtual mansions.

The latest Government census lists the municipality, which includes Greater Portmore, as being home to 180,000 Jamaicans — though estimates from political canvassing suggest that the number of residents could be significantly higher.

Whatever the true population size, the uncontrovertible fact is that the municipality was largely built by WIHCON, and is the island’s largest residential community outside of Kingston and St Andrew.

Bruce reminds us of yet another way that WIHCON’s impact is still felt today beyond its own direct activities and in a manner that most Jamaicans do not realise.

She attributes the creation of the National Housing Trust (NHT) in the 1970s to a recommendation from Mayer Matalon, who in addition to being chairman of WIHCON was chairman and principal shareholder of ICD, the parent of the construction firm.

“Mayer took the idea to Manley,” Bruce beams. “The NHT gave the working class the opportunity to buy their homes.”

NHT, the Government scheme in which employees are required to contribute a portion of their income each month and employers a matching amount, has been, for over three decades, the major mortgage provider in the lower and middle income housing market.

In 1978, a 1,000-unit, two-bedroom community called Portsmouth, and which sold for $14,725, became the first WIHCON development to be funded with NHT money, followed in 1979 by the 900-unit Southborough — both in Portmore. The latter sold for $16,619.

While WIHCON has remained faithful to its raison d’être of providing housing solutions to lower and middle income earners, it has leveraged its expertise, financial and reputational capital built up over years of success within this end of the market, to venture into other important segments of the construction industry.

While this company has been at best a modest player in the upper middle to upper end townhouse market, it has to its credit major infrastructure work secured largely through Government contracts, but in some instances as contractor for other private developers.

Who would have imagined that WIHCON has built over 76 schools, police stations, clinics, post offices, health care centres, and university dorms throughout the island? Or that it is the largest builder of sewerage treatment plants in Jamaica?

Among some of the major projects that this company has undertaken in its role as a contractor to other developers are:

* The 120,000-square-foot Whitter Village shopping centre in Montego Bay;

* The newly-built 92,000 square foot Vista Print call centre building at Bogue in Montego Bay; and

* The Rex Nettleford Hall at UWI, Mona.

Its road construction work includes Manley Boulevard, the dual carriageway that links downtown Kingston and Windward Road via Rae Town; and the expansion of a mile-long section of Hope Road between King’s House and Liguanea, in Kingston, into the four-lane roadway it is today.

WIHCON’s leadership

• Mayer Matalon, chairman at inception

• Peter Melhado, current chairman

• Joseph A Matalon, former executive chairman

• Owen Matalon, former managing director

• Robert Clivo, past managing director

• Delroy Alcott, current managing director

Moses Jackson is the founder and convenor of the Jamaica Observer annual Business Leader Award programme. He may be reached at moseshbsjackson@yahoo.com