Editorial | Failing downtown and urban renewal

It is past time for the administration to outline a policy or its thinking on urban renewal in Jamaica, as well as respond to Glen Christian’s complaint that he and private-sector colleagues have been frustrated by government inaction into abandoning a major development in the market district of downtown Kingston.

For if the likes of Mr Christian, a wealthy and influential entrepreneur, a big employer and a member of the boards of government agencies – including, ironically, the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) – can be exasperated to the point of chucking it in, the prospects for a concentrated attack on Jamaica’s urban blight, with the support of private capital and community action, seems bleak.

We are not aware that there is a full inventory of the state of decay in Jamaica’s urban communities, where more than half of the country’s population lives. But as important as having such data is for a programmatic approach to its reversal, we do not need to have this empirical analysis to know that it is pervasive. You need only drive around metropolitan Kingston, Spanish Town and its environs, May Pen in Clarendon, Montego Bay, or Savanna-la-Mar in Westmoreland for a scope of the crisis.

This newspaper, as we have said previously, had hoped that by adding urban renewal to the title of the ministry (it also covers housing, environment and climate change) to which he assigned Pearnel Charles Jr 15 months ago, Mr Andrew Holness was signalling that his administration intended a frontal assault on urban blight and the rescuing of towns and cities from their decay. Bits and pieces have happened here and there, but nothing to suggest that there is or will be, a coordinated approach to the matter. At least, most people have not heard from either Mr Holness or Mr Charles.

CRISIS OF URBAN JAMAICA

Nowhere is more emblematic of the crisis of urban Jamaica, or the absence of a coordinated policy approach to it, than downtown Kingston, the old section of the capital, a classic grid-patterned city set out nearly 300 years ago. Its bustling market district and commercial areas turn over billions of dollars annually – by some estimates, up to 10 per cent of the island’s GDP. But since the trek uptown started in the 1960s and accelerated in the next decade, downtown has been left to become gritty and crime-infested, where business is conducted mostly in the daytime and workers leave at dusk.

There, of course, have been some private-sector initiatives to stop the rot. A few firms with roots downtown have invested in their facilities, and the Government, with Chinese support, constructed its recently opened foreign ministry on the Kingston Harbour waterfront.

However, a year ago, speaking at the reopening of Scotiabank Jamaica downtown headquarters, Prime Minister Holness complained of the failure of property owners to take advantage of tax rebates on construction costs and rental income to drive the area’s redevelopment.

“As I travel through downtown Kingston and I look at the buildings and the facilities, there is no question that there is so much potential … in the properties here, but the incentives have not been taken up,” he said. “The property holders … have not reinvested in the area.”

He offered no explanation for the private sector’s circumspection, which some attribute to the Government’s poor record at providing security for downtown, and its slow roll-out of public infrastructure, such as water and sewerage to replace the most decrepit ones that merely limp along. The incompetence of the city’s government at the simplest things, like keeping the streets clean and maintaining order in the market district, add to the list of disincentives.

Then there are the other big issues, such as the one that caused the ire of Mr Christian, driving him to go public in September. Four years earlier, speaking at this newspaper’s long service award function, Mr Christian, the principal of the pharmaceutical manufacturing and distribution group Cari-Med, laid out a plan for jump-starting the redevelopment of downtown. There was a plan, under a public-private partnership, for a 200,000 square-foot “lifestyle centre”, just south of the unkempt Coronation Market.

“We envisage a corridor extending from Darling Street and Mitchell Street from the market to the lifestyle centre, continuing to the craft market,” Mr Christian said. The proposal largely mirrored a plan proposed by the Planning Institute of Jamaica in the aftermath of the bloody episode in Tivoli Gardens, located in the area, when police and soldiers met resistance in their bid to capture the gangster, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke.

PULLED THE PLUG

But more than a decade on from the Tivoli Gardens incident, Mr Christian told The Gleaner that he and his private-sector patterns called the Shoreline Group, had pulled the plug on the project – and with that decision, their planned investment of US$50 million. “We had to pull out,” he said. “We weren’t getting anywhere after nine years.”

Perhaps two decades earlier, a similar private-sector consortium had planned to accelerate the redevelopment of downtown. Agreements were signed with the P.J. Patterson administration. The venture fizzled.

The crux of the problem in his case, Mr Christian said, was a lack of political will to get things down, manifested by the absence of synergy between government agencies. The bureaucracy moved in circles.

Notably, Prime Minister Holness has not responded to Mr Christian’s public indictment, although a few QUANGOs have offered ineffectual platitudes. The UDC has nothing current on its website on the redevelopment of downtown.

If millionaire business elites, with big bucks on the table, cannot get action out of the Government for a showpiece project, we shudder to think about the prospects for the more mundane but fundamental urban renewal in residential communities. Unlike Mr Christian’s group, however, this newspaper won’t fold. We insist that rebuilding inner-city communities is possible with the creative use of public- and private-sector money and community equity, some of which can come from sweat. If there is a commitment. And a plan.