Editorial | The case for urban renewal

Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ exhortation to private capital to unlock real estate opportunities in Jamaica’s decayed urban communities is supported by this newspaper.

However, as The Gleaner Editorial Board has previously noted, the scale of Jamaica’s urban blight and the social complexities of the problem require more than piecemeal responses and are likely to be beyond the capacity solely of private investors.

The problem is in need of a multi-year and holistic national response that would benefit from partnerships between the public and private sectors, as well as international financial institutions.

Prime Minister Holness’ latest allusion to the island’s crisis of urban decay came on Wednesday at the opening of a commercial complex, developed by Kingston Real Estate Investment Trust (KREIT), on Rousseau Road, which runs through largely gritty areas of the capital.

“We have valuable real estate assets in our communities just waiting for entrepreneurs to see the vision and see the value and unlock it with the investment,” Dr Holness said in celebrating KREIT’s project.

Fundamentally, the prime minister is right. Indeed, some of that is taking place in areas other than on Rousseau Road, with the emergence of pockets of high-rise commercial and multi-storey buildings on the edges of inner-city communities. However, the effort is disjointed and piecemeal. There are as yet no large-scale urban renewal or revitalisation projects, despite many promises across political administrations.

According to the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN), 61 per cent of Jamaicans live in urban communities, an 11-percentage-point increase from a decade earlier. This island is urbanising rapidly.

Approximately a quarter of the population lives in Kingston and St Andrew (KSA) or the Corporate Area. That jumps to up to 35 per cent when measured as the Kingston Metropolitan Region (KMR), encompassing the nearby urban areas of St Catherine.

Many of these residents live in tenements with rundown or inadequate services. A substantial proportion are among the estimated one-third of Jamaicans who either squat or otherwise occupy informal settlements. Government estimates place the island’s housing deficit at 150,000 homes.

GREENFIELD HOUSING

Jamaican governments have in the past prioritised greenfield housing developments, away from commercial centres and critical government services, while older communities became increasingly rundown.

It is a matter Dr Holness addressed in June, conceding in a speech that the government’s housing policy had to go into new directions.

“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.”

There are no signs of how this will unfold, at least in the scope and breadth that the problem demands. In his Rousseau Road speech on Wednesday, the prime minister said that while the government would consider new laws to promote such ventures, a regulatory environment already existed “that would assist real estate development on a large scale”.

The context of the event, however, suggested that the focus was primarily on commercial developments. Inner-city Jamaica is in need of a mix of commercial and residential real estate, including at prices that don’t effectively price existing residents, some of whose homes have decent bones, out of the places they have lived for decades.

LEVERAGE RESOURCES

In seeking to rebuild urban Jamaica, the government can leverage the resources of state agencies like the National Housing Trust (NHT) and the Housing Agency of Jamaica (HAJ) while seeking partnership with the private sector and the support of international partners. Cash and sweat equity from residents, some of whom do not have formal titles to their properties, can contribute to the capital for the project.

Rebuilding inner-city communities has practical value if done right. Generally, they already have, although in some cases rundown or dilapidated, basic infrastructure, such as roads, water and sewerage systems. And they are close to key services and amenities.

Importantly, people living in decent communities rather than gritty tenements are likely to engage in less anti-social behaviour and embrace greater social cohesion. There is likely to be less crime.

But doing this is hard work, much harder than building a greenfield housing project. Good sense, however, says that it should be done, at scale.