THE Government’s push to convert farmlands into housing developments will prove costly for Jamaica, argued independent architect Clifton Yap.

“I know what I am about to say, for some of you, is heresy,” he told a group of approximately 100 housing experts at the two-day Regional Housing Conference that opened at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in Kingston on Monday.

“Affordable housing has always been a challenge, but you will not achieve your goal if the policy is flawed,” Yap said.

The Government plans to divest 780 acres of agricultural lands in Montpelier, St James, for housing and shopping.

The sale would become one of the largest land divestments in years.

The lands are owned by the Development Bank of Jamaica (DBJ) through Montpelier Citrus Company Limited (MCC) which it acquired from National Commercial Bank in 1999. The MCC property comprises three farms totalling 2,972 acres (1,203 hectares).

In May 2010, some 524 acres were sold to family-owned Ramble Enterprise Limited. The Government has failed, to date, to sell the remaining acreage. It now wants to create a dormitory community — dubbed the Portmore of Montego Bay — some 19 minutes away from the second city for tourism and call centre workers. The DBJ indicates that there is clear evidence of significant unmet demand for housing in and around this area.

Government views these dormitory communities as filling the demand for affordable housing. But for Yap, principal of Clifton Yap Architects, this policy of “urban sprawl” fails to include the loss of prime farmland and green areas, loss of water aquifers, costly highway and utility connectivity, increased car and fuel imports, and lower quality of life for daily commuters.

“[The housing agencies] and the private developers that they subsidise have been wantonly consuming vast acreages of Jamaica’s rural agricultural lands and green areas,” said Yap, who is past president of the Jamaica Institute of Architects and former chairman of the planning sub-committee for the Kingston and St Andrew Parish Development Committee.

“While the utilisation of cheap flat lands may seem attractive at first glance, and housing agencies believe they are getting the best value for the funds they are spending to provide housing, they are, unfortunately, very much mistaken,” he said.

The housing agencies, he charged, are overseeing the “wasteful depletion of prime agricultural lands” at a time when Government is aiming to reduce the country’s food import bill to save foreign exchange.

Yap, an award-winning architect, was one of the earliest critics of Government’s islandwide toll network — Highway 2000.

“It will get much worse because the Government of Jamaica has deliberately and actively pursued a policy of increasing the base of commuters who have to drive on the toll highways,” he told the local and overseas housing experts who participated in the conference under the theme ‘Transforming Communities Through Housing and Economic Development’.

“They did it for the French (highway developers) and now for the Chinese (highway developers),” Yap said.

The Chinese Government-owned China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) recently completed and opened the Mount Rosser bypass leg of Highway 2000.

Yap said that CHEC will create a dormitory community and thereby have “their own base of commuters that will have to pay toll”.

The solution, according to Yap, is to build within or around urban areas.

“To achieve this they should adapt the approaches done in cities around the world. It’s nothing new,” he said.

Yap asserted that Jamaica will fail to achieve its Vision 2030 goals through the policy of housing sprawl. According to the DBJ, the Vision 2030 Sector Plan for Housing highlighted that up to 2006 Jamaica needed to provide 15,000 new housing units and upgrade 9,700 units yearly to ensure that the housing stock keeps pace with population.

However, trends from 2006 onwards indicate that Jamaica must accelerate its efforts to achieve the critical housing developments required.