Editorial | Rebuilding inner cities

While Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ reiteration of his government’s intention to rebuild Jamaica’s town is appreciated, the administration must be clear of its priorities in this urban renewal plan.

Rehabilitating or sprucing up town centres and their associated infrastructure may be important, but that mustn’t deflect from, or be at the expense of, addressing deterioration and squalor of too many residential communities in urban Jamaica. Nor should be the building of new cities. They, however, appear to remain at the top of the prime minister’s agenda.

Addressing a symposium on town planning last week, Mr Holness emphasised the ongoing project to transform the old Goodyear tyre factory at Morant Bay, St Thomas, into its new town centre.

A similar development is planned further east, in the parish of Portland, as well as in the island’s west, in the towns of Lucea and Negril.

Mr Holness also recommitted the government to building a city of between 10,000 and 15,000 homes, plus commercial facilities, at Bernard Lodge, on the southern St Catherine plains. The government’s National Environment and Planning Agency described Bernard Lodge in a planning document as the island’s “most fertile … A1 soil”. Hefty chunks of the former sugar plantation has already been turned over to develop real estate, further diminishing the lands available for agriculture. The encroachment of real-estate developers on Bernard Lodge, however, preceded Mr Holness.

Mr Holness has also previously spoken of a city in southwestern Jamaica, in the parish of St Elizabeth, but has not recently talked publicly about this idea.

THREE CONTEXTS

This newspaper understands these schemes in three contexts. The first is that most of the island’s town centres are decayed and gritty. They have, as Mr Holness said, received little attention over decades.

Then, according to the prime minister’s count, there is a deficit of 150,000 housing solutions. People need homes.

Finally, shiny, nice new cities and town centres, or new municipalities or parishes (which is what he said the Bernard Lodge city would help accomplish for the city municipality of Portmore) would probably be good visual caps to Mr Holness’ legacy.

Overlaying all this, of course, is that greenfield developments are easier to deliver than redeveloping tough, run-down residential communities like those that adjoin the main towns of most parishes.

Yet, fixing these districts is a fundamental part of overcoming Jamaica’s crisis of anti-social behaviour, as reflected in a proliferation of gangs, criminality in inner-city neighbourhoods, a murder count of around 1,500 a year, and a homicide rate of 55 per 100,000.

An estimated 57 per cent of the island’s population lives in urban areas, and up to 900,000 people, a third of all the island’s residents, squat or live in informal settlements, often in decayed tenements.

For policymakers and bureaucrats, it appears far easier to build new suburban communities, sometimes on lands that ought properly to be left to agriculture. These developments also come with other costs: the loss of the efficiency of cities and the need to provide infrastructure and services for them to function reasonably well. Things generally do not end as well as initially conceptualised.

Moreover, even as inner-city communities are abandoned and grow more derelict, the pace of new development is insufficient for the requirement. And in many cases, people just cannot economically afford to leave their old communities for the greenfield projects. They become trapped in the squalor and grit of communities that fester in resentments and become breeding grounds for gangs.

ARGUMENT

That is one argument for their redemption. Another is the efficiencies offered by cities. In many respects, too, these communities provide reasonable bones upon which to (re)build. They have well-developed road networks and water systems. In some instances they can be easily connected to sewage systems. Many of the homes are also salvageable.

A major problem, though, is that large swathes of inner-city residents cannot afford to rehabilitate their homes, and many do not hold titles. They cannot collateralise their properties.

These are not insurmountable problems for any government that is invested in inner-city renewal. It is possible to fast-track the delivery of titles to the people entitled to them. So, too, can the assets of state-owned agencies like the National Housing Trust (NHT) be leveraged to expand funding, via the private sector and international partners, for urban renewal projects. For instance, it could be a policy position that the NHT – which has over $330 billion in assets and spends nearly $50 billion on housing solution initiatives – halt, or halve, its direct investment in greenfield developments for, say, five years, or a decade, to concentrate on inner-city renewal. Schemes can be so designed that the private sector gets a reasonable return on investments that also achieve social good.

There is no reason why Fayval Williams’ idea for Back Bush, in her St Andrew Eastern constituency, cannot, where suitable, be scaled up nationally. It would, however, take extremely hard work. And exceptional management.