Editorial | Tackling urban renewal

We welcome Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ pledge to launch a “coordinated and strategic” effort to bring private money to inner-city renewal and look forward for the roll-out of the administration’s plans. We, however, hope it has greater urgency and is more ambitious than what was implied by the prime minister in Parliament last week.

As this newspaper has often pointed out, it does not require sophisticated analytics, driven by complicated data sets, to have a good sense of Jamaica’s crisis of urban decay. A drive around the Greater Kingston area or the crime-infested urban communities in parishes such as St Catherine, Clarendon, St James and Westmoreland will tell the story. Tenements, grime and squalor underline the tale.

There is no recent government survey of the quality of the housing stock in these communities. However, there is some data that can be used as a crude proxy for the depth of the crisis. It is estimated, for instance, that more than 900,000 Jamaicans, or approximately one-third of the island’s population, live in squatter settlements. These cover more than 700 communities, over half of which are in the Kingston Metropolitan Region, home for more than half a million people.

This picture provided the backdrop of this newspaper’s welcome of the prime minister’s implicit promise of the special focus on urban renewal after the 2020 general election, by especially placing the subject in the name of a new ministry that also had responsibility for housing and the environment. The mission fizzled, either because of the absence of resources, or the incapacity of the former minister, Pearnel Charles, Jr. Or both. Those portfolios are again under the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, of which the prime minister is the de jure minister, and in which the key regulatory and financial agencies needed to drive such projects always resided.

INNER-CITY COMMUNITIES

Speaking in the Budget Debate, Mr Holness lamented that while Jamaica is enjoying a construction boom, little has happened in inner-city communities, despite the tax incentives available for investment in urban renewal projects. Some of the reasons for this, he argued, were developers’ concerns about security; the fragmentation of land, which lessens the ability to undertake projects of scale, so as to reduce costs; the difficulty in determining ownership of properties; and the slow pace of government bureaucracy.

None of these are implacable problems. Their solutions might have been well in hand if the Government, across administrations, had begun to shape a clear policy on urban renewal over the several years that The Gleaner has been making the case for such action. Jamaican administrations, however, have preferred greenfield housing developments, some of which have been built on the island’s best agricultural lands, which will be the case with the 15,000-home city planned for Bernard Lodge, St Catherine, which is the home, according to the National Environment and Planning Agency, of Jamaica’s “most fertile… A-1 soil”.

But as Mr Holness noted last week – echoing a point often made by this newspaper – not only is the topography of many of the inner-city communities suitable for construction and the land relatively cheap, they already have basic infrastructure and are close to major economic centres.

The issue, therefore, is how to maximise these advantages.

Mr Holness told Parliament that more urban areas will be zoned for developers to receive tax incentives for investing in renewal projects; and the Government will use its power to acquire “parcels of land for the purpose of renewing and developing communities of affordable housing in urban areas”. The Government will also spend on the redevelopment of public infrastructure in the designated areas.

We support these initiatives. But the expected outcomes from these programmes, based on figures separately offered by the prime minister to Parliament, won’t significantly contribute to the more than 75,000 homes he expects his administration to deliver during its current term.

In its manifesto for the 2020 election, Mr Holness’ party said it would build 70,000 homes. In his remarks last week, the prime minister indicated (PM) that 75,095 homes had been “programmed” for the five fiscal years 2021-22 to 2025-26 – seven per cent more than was promised. However, only 700 of these homes will fall under what was labelled the ‘Special Urban Renewal Housing Project’. That figure is less than one per cent (0.932 per cent) of the housing starts projected over the five fiscal years. None of these homes, based on the PM’s public documentation, are as yet “programmed”.

AGGRESSIVE APPROACH

We hope for a more aggressive approach to urban renewal and believe the “coordinated and strategic” arrangement with the private sector should transcend tax incentives, and the clearing of the bureaucratic and other logjams for private developers to deliver new-build houses. There are ways, for instance, to leverage funds from government institutions, like the National Housing Trust, with money from the private sector and international agencies to enhance the pool of capital for urban renewal.

Additionally, many of the homes in these communities still have decent bones and can be rehabilitated. Their owners cannot afford the investment. An ambitious enterprise might find ways for people to access affordable capital, to which they could add sweat equity to help to finance the refurbishment of their property as part of the overarching project.

Hopefully, what the prime minister eventually unveils will have community involvement and include out-of-the-box, creative ideas to get the job done. The matter, however, is urgent.