Editorial | The urgency of urban renewal

When Prime Minister Andrew Holness last week helped to open the European Union’s (EU) new offices on Seymour Avenue in the Golden Triangle area of Kingston and St Andrew, most attention was to his remarks about the good relations between Jamaica and the EU, including the development support Brussels provides to the island. The technical and policy stuff.

Indeed, the prime minister lauded the fact that the EU had moved to “a new permanent home” – the delegation previously rented office space – as a signal of Europe’s commitment to Jamaica.

“The construction of these facilities not only underscores the EU’s desire to continue its investment in Jamaica’s socio-economic development, but also indicates sustained interest in the strengthening of our bilateral partnerships,” Mr Holness said.

The prime minister also made another significant observation, on which he did not elaborate. Or, more to the point, he did not make the obvious link between that remark and policy options available to his administration, which it should seize.

The building into which the EU delegation has moved, is in one of the choicest parts of town. It is an old Georgian-inspired structure that has been renovated and expanded, in style with its historic façade. It has been kitted with many green facilities, including solar panels, ports for charging electric vehicles, rainwater collection cisterns and recycling options.

“This new office embodies our commitment to issues we care about, chief among them climate change, environmental protection,” said Fredrik Ekfeldt. Which we believe should be among the standard requirements of the many new medium- and high-rise buildings being approved for, or are under construction in the capital since the promulgation of new development orders allowing higher densities.

More critical, however, is what Mr Holness said the EU building is doing for the capital. “The decision to renovate an older structure is a welcome contribution to the modernisation of the city of Kingston,” he said.

The Jamaican capital may indeed be in need of modernising. But the Golden Triangle, and the uptown business district more broadly, is hardly reflective of Kingston’s sprawling urban decay, which has reached crisis proportions and is in need of urgent attention.

The administration, it has been reported, is currently undertaking a survey of the state of urban settlements and related matters. But previous government estimates are that 900,000 Jamaicans, or nearly one-third of the population, live in squatter or informal settlements – 700 of them. Many of these are in Kingston.

DEEPER ANALYSIS

But as this newspaper has said before, while deeper analysis is important to fine-tune policy, sophisticated data sets are not required to tell the story of Jamaica’s urban decay and the gritty squalor of the tenements in which tens of thousands of people live. A quick drive around the capital, and cursory observation of its inner-city communities, will lay that bare.

Tackling this problem is far more urgent, and is more sensible, than using a huge chunk of the island’s “most fertile … A1 soil” on the St Catherine plain to build a city of 17,000 homes, or the continuing encroachment on the island’s dwindling farmlands for greenfield housing projects. Indeed, there is no need for this newspaper to make the case of the correlation between decayed urban communities, social dysfunction and the high levels of crime within them – all of which are evident in inner-city Jamaica.

We had hoped that Prime Minister Holness’ establishment, after the 2020 general election, of a ministry with ‘urban renewal’ in its name was a signal of a concerted attack on the problem. Unfortunately, nothing changed. After less than two years the ministry was abandoned.

The emphasis, it now appears, is not on residential communities, but a resurgence of attention, of sorts, on the old business district of downtown Kingston. But even then, developers complain – as Stephen Facey, the executive of the Pan Jam Group did last week – that the Government is too slow at doing the things that support investment. “We talk and talk about doing,” Mr Facey said at the opening of a hotel owned by his company. “We need to do it … Time is running out. We need to move on. We need to take action.”

REJUVENATE DECAYED COMMUNITIES

We echo those sentiments with respect to decayed residential communities. It must be possible for the Government to leverage the resources of state agencies, such as the National Housing Trust and the Jamaica Mortgage Bank, to create innovative partnerships with private interests and property owners in inner-city areas (including helping the latter group to obtain property titles) to rejuvenate decayed communities. In this regard, the Government might revisit some of the concepts that underpinned Operation PRIDE, but with the requisite oversight to prevent the plunder that apparently bedevilled that innovative scheme.

Indeed, a portion of the homes in decayed or decaying communities have basic, or even good, bones. And although these are often run-down, they also have the advantage of basic infrastructure, such as roads and water and, in some cases, sewer lines. Additionally, these communities tend to be close to economic and social services, lessening the need for the additional infrastructure buildouts associated with greenfield projects.

Moreover, the new EU delegation building, with its green facilities, is a nod to global warming and climate change, one of whose consequences are the parching of Earth and the general retardation of how things grow. On the current trajectory, it will require substantially more land to grow the same amount of food, which makes it illogical to put our “most fertile … A1 soil” under concrete. The current bout of food inflation, associated with the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, provides a taste of what might happen in the event of declined production.

Aggressive action on urban renewal, therefore, makes sense all round.