Editorial | Tackling urban renewal

No one is likely to credibly contest Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ conclusion that downtown Kingston is in a worse state of decay than four decades ago.

But the problem is not only on the capital’s waterfront and the old business and economic hub.  For, as this newspaper noted a year ago, when the prime minister made a similar comment about urban blight, it doesn’t need new data or analyses to appreciate the scale of the crisis. A quick drive through the city’s urban communities - as well as towns across the island - will quickly reveal the depth and breadth of the problem.

The question is, what is to be done about it?  

While the prime minister periodically expresses his concerns for the decay of old communities, efforts for dealing with the matter have, at best, been limited or halting.  The National Housing Trust, and other agencies, have constructed a handful of multifloor buildings in selected areas to deal with extreme cases of substandard homes. However, there is yet to be a concerted effort, at scale, at urban renewal.  

Dr Holness has now hinted that the issue could receive serious attention from the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA), the powerful, special-purpose vehicle set up to lead the rebuilding after the destruction by Hurricane Melissa last October.  But there is need for further and better particulars.

The prime minister’s most recent allusion to the issue of urban decay was in his speech 12 days ago at the annual awards function of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC). Addressing specifically the problems facing downtown Kingston, Dr Holness, who is 53, recalled that his high school graduation function was held at a hotel in downtown Kingston.  He and his fellow students felt relatively comfortable attending at night. 

Yet, even at the turn of the 1990s, the widely held perception of downtown Kingston was of a hard, gritty, crime-ridden environment, with swathes of derelict buildings and tenements. The area was vibrant by day but largely off-limits at nights

“... It hasn't changed in over 40 years,” the prime minister said of the region.  “In fact, it looks worse.”

In recent years, a few firms, private developers and non-profits have made stabs at renewal. For the Government’s part, the foreign ministry’s new offices were also built on the Kingston waterfront.  The administration has also offered tax incentives for reconstruction.

But said Dr Holness: “While I applaud the attempt (at renewal), it is merely a patch. There is so much more to do for downtown Kingston.

“The infrastructure there is in need of significant intervention - from the sewage to the roads to the sick buildings. It needs a massive plan.”

Downtown Kingston’s degeneration was put in motion more than six decades ago with the start of the development of the New Kingston business district and an accelerated trek by businesses and wealthier residents northward. Political violence and increasing crime in several communities helped to deepen the decay.

A fix at the scale required by downtown, the prime minister argued, went beyond whether Jamaica could afford the venture. It involved, too, whether Jamaica possessed “the administrative and organisational capability to do it with speed”.    Although not especially geared at downtown, it was concerns such as these, the prime minister implied, that caused the Government to opt for NaRRA, with its flexibility to workaround regulations and get things done fast.

Those concerns, however, should not be a cause for paralysis. With the appropriate policy focus, and creativity, an institution like NaRRA is not strictly necessary to undertake community-level urban renewal.  Indeed, this appeared to have been the intended pivot by the prime minister before the hurricane and NaRRA was in contemplation.

In a speech at the launch of a housing project in June, Dr Holness said that his Government’s housing policy had to adjust to address the country's deficit of 150,000 new homes.

“It has to shift to focus on rebuilding our inner city and long-established residential communities that are now in decay,” he said.  “... There are neighbourhoods in Kingston where they were built 60-to 70 years ago, and they are in decline.  The next chapter in Jamaica’s housing journey is the resuscitation, rehabilitation, and renewal of existing housing developments and residential areas.”

Until now, the Government’s housing programmes have been primarily focused on greenfield, suburban developments, often on fertile agricultural lands. These new suburban developments call for the build-out of expensive infrastructure.

The neighbourhoods to which Dr Holness referred as suffering from urban rot generally have, or are in the proximity of, critical infrastructure - road, water, electricity, and, in some stances, central sewerage systems although these may require upgrading.  Some people hold titles to the properties they occupy. Others may have informal ownership. Some are squatters.

It will demand diligent and concentrated effort to unravel these arrangements. In that event, it is easier to construct greenfield developments although this approach is not necessarily or socially better.

As this newspaper has suggested in the past, creative thinking can leverage the money that government has in institutions like the NHT and the capital from the domestic private sector and international partners, as well as the equity inner-city residents have in their properties to affect transformation.

This may mean government agencies, for a time, halting, or limiting investments in greenfield suburban housing schemes.  And hard work.