Editorial | Beyond Washington Boulevard

There can hardly be any complaints over Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ acknowledgement of embarrassment at the dereliction and squalor along Washington Boulevard, the main artery from the west into the uptown areas of the Jamaican capital.

Indeed, it is welcome that Mr Holness intends to do something about it and that he appreciates the positive effects public parks and green areas have on people’s sense of well-being and of their communities in which they live. Which is why we applaud the Government’s plan to redevelop Maverley Park, at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and Molynes Road, for which the prime minister broke ground last week.

Hopefully, too, the Maverley Park project marks an acceleration of initiatives to develop, and maintain, green spaces across the island, as well as the reversal of policy decisions that will impede, or water down, these efforts. Specifically, the administration should drop its plan to construct the new parliament building at National Heroes Park, the old Race Course, and develop the land for what the legislature, in law, intended: a recreational area.

Additionally, the prime minister’s observation about Washington Boulevard provides a good segue to a fuller conversation about how the Kingston and St Andrew metropolitan region and other urban regions are managed and how to rescue our cities and towns from worsening decay. That discussion should be urgently engaged, for it is quite obvious that the municipal governments, which have primary responsibilities for managing the cities and towns, do a terrible job of it.

RAMSHACKLE

In last week’s speech at Maverley Park, Mr Holness lamented the ramshackle Washington Boulevard heading into the city from the west.

He said: “I don’t think we can say that it gives us pride when you look to the left and to the right upon entering the city coming from Mandela Highway. Certainly, as you come off the overpass, coming onto Washington Boulevard and you look to your left at New Haven, that is not what you want to see greet you as you enter the city. As you drive along, you see all kinds of operations that really should be back-office operations, like garages and all kinds of other operations, which interfere with the free flow of traffic.”

In the 1990s, Washington Boulevard was redeveloped into a dual carriageway. Its roadside auto repair and bodywork shops were removed; concrete block walls replaced rusty galvanised zinc fences; and on most sections of the roadway, the drains were designed to prevent direct vehicular access from the boulevard to the parallel drivable paths adjacent to the buildings. The medians and sidewalks were beautified with shrubs.

But typical of Jamaica, nothing was or has been maintained. As the prime minister noted, the authorities did not enforce the laws when the garages reappeared and other shops and businesses opened. This happens, Mr Holness explained – rightly – because politicians do not act because they are afraid of losing votes.

Washington Boulevard’s seediness, however, need not be as bad as it is. And its dishevelment is not entirely the fault of the people who own or control the eyesores that bothered Mr Holness as a youth riding buses along the route and now as prime minister (PM). The medians and verges are usually overgrown and unkempt because the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation, the municipal government, is horrible at keeping them tidy. The central government’s National Solid Waste Management Authority does not make cleaning garbage from the roadway a priority. Similarly, patching Washington Boulevard’s potholes or keeping its traffic markings fresh doesn’t have precedence at the National Works Agency.

OPPORTUNITY

However, in the wake of Mr Holness’ observation, there is an opportunity for the Government to show that it can do small things that make a difference to people’s lives – and get them right. But that will also require a change in another apparent assumption of those who manage our affairs: that even the most basic community projects must cost tremendous amounts of money way beyond their apparent real value. These processes need robust oversight and accountability to prevent the excesses.

Further, in Washington Boulevard, there is a much larger issue than the aesthetics of the gateway into the city. The bigger question is about stopping the communities along the route, and urban Jamaica generally, from going further to seed. Happily, New Haven, Maverley, Waterhouse, and others along Washington Boulevard are far from the worst of Jamaica’s sufferers of urban blight.

Mostly, these communities have relatively decent housing stocks and road and water infrastructure. Given the PM’s focus on Washington Boulevard, these communities could be used as the template for a major urban-renewal programme along the lines suggested by this newspaper: leveraging the resources of government housing and other institutions to access, and expand, private-sector capital as well as money from international partners and community equity for an assault on urban rot.

Under this sustained urban renewal enterprise, government agencies such as the National Housing Trust might suspend support for greenfield developments for five to 10 years, and the administration would shelve initiatives such as its plan to build a new city on the country’s “most fertile … A1 soil” at Bernard Lodge on the St Catherine plain.