LOW-INCOME housing is but one of the many concerns in real estate and development that former prime minister of Jamaica, Bruce Golding will discuss at the E Nadine Isaacs Memorial Lecture slated for next Thursday May 12.

Golding is slated to be keynote speaker at the event being hosted by Gore Developments Limited (GDL) and the Phillip and Christine Gore Family Foundation. The theme of the lecture is ‘60 Years of Housing in Jamaica’, which will be held at the Phillip Gore Building situated at Jamaica College in St Andrew.

“The lecture will be held on what would have been Nadine Isaacs’s 80th birthday. For those who don’t know, Isaacs would have worked in the Ministry of Housing in the Sites and Services Department and later served on several boards, including the Jamaica Mortgage Bank. She was once chair of the National Resources Conservation Authority (now NEPA). Since she entered the construction industry, she [had] worked tirelessly to address low-income housing by proffering ideas and redevelopment plans. This has resulted in her being celebrated and recognised, even posthumously, for her invaluable contribution to Jamaica’s development,” Golding explained.

Gore Developments Limited and the Gore Family Foundation are the masterminds behind completing residential projects such as the Phoenix Park Village in St Catherine and the Camelot Village in St Ann.

According to attorney-at-law Christine Gore, the company constructs five houses per day. It would have built over 11,000 homes, which have funded “thousands of basic school and tertiary level students enrolled in many programmes”.

“After Nadine died in 2004, the memorial scholarship was established for budding architecture students at the University of Technology by Phillip Gore, her brother-in-law and chairman of GDL. Since then, more than 15 students have benefited from this scholarship, some of whom have become senior executive architects at top firms across the island in the Jamaican Government,” she explained.

She emphasised that both organisations will significantly increase their scholarship donations to the State-owned university in the coming year, the sum of which will be revealed at the upcoming lecture.

In 1986 Nadine Isaacs was elected as the first woman president of the Jamaican Institute of Architects, where she served two terms in the capacity of president. In 1999 she became the first woman to head the Caribbean School of Architecture at the University of Technology.