There is a particular kind of house you see across Jamaica.
You find it behind zinc fences and old fruit trees. Sometimes perched above a road cut into the hills. Sometimes tucked between newer apartment blocks in Kingston. Sometimes sitting quietly near the sea in St Ann, St Elizabeth or Portland, slowly ageing beneath salt wind and rain.
The paint fades first.
Then the veranda sags a little.
A grandchild moves into one room. An uncle occupies another. Somebody starts a shop at the front. Somebody migrates to England. Somebody else says they paid for the roof from foreign. Nobody quite agrees who owns what anymore.
And eventually, the house itself becomes suspended in time.
Not abandoned exactly. But trapped.
Across Jamaica and much of the Caribbean, one of the region’s biggest hidden crises is sitting quietly inside ordinary family homes and parcels of land. It is the inheritance crisis.
Not inheritance in the billionaire sense. Not sprawling estat…
