Editorial | SOEs, crime and urban renewal

PEARNEL CHARLES Jr, it is noticed, has not featured much, if at all, in discussions about the Government’s strategies for fighting crime, the latest of which is this week’s return to a reliance on states of public emergency that give the security forces wide powers to arrest and detain people without trial. Mr Charles should be prominent in those debates.

For Mr Charles, who is responsible for the environment in Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ administration, also oversees two other critical portfolios: housing and urban renewal, although with respect to the former, he does not have authority for the National Housing Trust (NHT), the Government’s rich shelter-financing agency. The NHT falls under Prime Minister Holness. Mr Charles, therefore, could not be held accountable for the NHT’s controversial Ruthven Towers scheme, with its J$27-million and J$35- million apartments that are far out of the reach of the vast majority of the Trust’s contributors.

Mr Charles, though, would be expected to have something to say about urban renewal. He, however, has been largely quiet on the issues since Prime Minister Holness made it a specific portfolio subject after the September 2020 general election. Despite the absence of hard data on the matter, there is an obvious intersection between Jamaica’s decayed urban communities and the country’s high rates of criminal violence.

Run-down neighbourhoods

So, it is hardly surprising that among the seven police divisions in which Mr Holness declared to be in states of emergency (SOEs), four – St Andrew South, Kingston West, Kingston Central, and Kingston East – were well known for their many tough, run-down neighbourhoods and gang-related violence. The same is true for segments of the otherwise mostly rural parishes of St James, Hanover and Westmoreland.

Indeed, according to the police, of the 1,240 murders committed in Jamaica up to last week (10 per cent more than for the corresponding period in 2020), 392, or approximately 32 per cent, were in these Kingston/St Andrew divisions. The three parish-based divisions accounted for 272 (22 per cent) of the homicides. The trend is similar in other inner-city communities, whose residents are part of the estimated 56 per cent of the island’s population who live in urban centres, and account for a goodly portion of the approximately one-third of Jamaicans, upwards of 900,000 people, who live in squatter or informal communities.

As this newspaper observed when Prime Minister Holness assigned Mr Charles to the seemingly sweeping super ministry: “The lack of, or broken down, infrastructure and other services contribute to social dysfunction, which helps to fuel crime and other antisocial behaviour.”

In other words, while we expected the Government to employ various policing and other strategies and tactics to confront the crisis of criminality, it was clear that a multipronged, frontal assault on urban decay, and the social ravages it spawns, ought to be a priority for the administration. Which is what we thought had become obvious to Prime Minister Holness, and what he intended to signal by establishing the portfolio for urban renewal. That was notwithstanding the lack of policy specifics on urban renewal in the Government’s election manifesto, unlike its promise to build 70,000 homes during its five-year term, with 14 per cent (10,000) to be earmarked for people under 35, who would be eligible for 100 per cent loans for their purchases.

No clear policy direction

But despite sporadic statements about urban renewal in the 15 months since it was made a specific ministerial assignment, these have mostly been enervating, absent of focus, vision or clear policy direction. Worse, there has been no effort, or none that is obvious, to mobilise people who live in decayed urban communities to collective action or partnerships to rescue or rebuild their communities.

Yet, many inner-city communities have, though often badly frayed, basic infrastructure, including roads and water and power. In some, a significant portion of the housing is salvageable. Some residents own their homes, even if they do not formally hold the titles. In these cases, it cannot be beyond the capability of the Government and private partners to find ways for these owners to establish property rights and extract equity from their real estate.

Neither should it be beyond the capacity of policymakers and private-sector experts to leverage the resources of public-sector agencies, such as the NHT, and of private capital, as well as equity that resides in communities – in the value of property and labour – for an assault, with profitable returns, socially and economically, on urban blight.

Indeed, renewing urban communities makes more sense – and is certainly more operationally efficient – than expanding ever more developments into suburbia, including into the country’s most fertile “A-1 soil”, as is intended at the Bernard Lodge Estate, on the plain of St Catherine. Much of these lands will be lost to agriculture.

The point is, urban renewal is a sensible idea that ought also to be an integral part of Jamaica’s crime plan.