Allow Jamaican columnist and developer/ architect Carlton Cunningham the voice of pride that shines through his mid-April column in The Gleaner as he describes his successful housing development:
Building hope through housing
Jamaican housing is stratified. Uptown erects gated communities while downtown erects settlements at the gates. Some settlers provide valuable services to the gated, while others, marginalised by lack of skills and, motivated by a “we-are-poor-because-you-are-rich” perception, seek to destroy the gate and the gated.
Ever wonder where live the guys cleaning your hotel room?
It may well have been in
You hold your dominos cupped in your left hand
And slam your tile on the table
Of course, our hosts were pleased not only that the gangly pasty white boy sat down and played, but also that he was not entirely clueless about the game. We befriended one of them, Linford Campbell (a very Jamaican name, I came to learn), and eventually he invited us for dinner, whereupon we walked maybe a mile on a dirt road up into the verdant hills to his new house, a four-room cement construction built via a Michael-Manley inspired housing scheme, about which he was button-bustingly proud.
Jamaican affordable subdivision: run wires and plumbing, stucco the walls, and it’s home sweet home
It’s been a decade since I thought of Linford – we lost touch in the mid-80’s – and yet I can without difficulty summon up memories of his whitewashed and pastel walls, his Bakelite plates, and our dinner of carrots and squash and goat.
It was our first encounter with housing in the global South, and it was followed soon thereafter by our seeing The Harder They Come, a remarkable cinema-verite movie that spotlighted the intersection of poverty, drugs, crime, and housing:
The album that introduced reggae to
Well, they tell me there’s a pie up in the sky
Waiting for me when I die
But between the day you’re born and when you die
No one ever seems to hear you cry
But as sure as the sun will shine
I’m gonna get my share of what’s mine
And then the harder they come
The harder they fall, one and all (Ohh, ohh, ohh)
I said the harder they come
Harder they fall, one and all
As we’ve seen around the world, like lives with like, and when rich people can use zoning or gates to create enclaves for themselves, many often do.
But, would they come? After all, social stratification is natural and Jamaicans don’t like to mix!
People need workforce housing, and if they cannot winkle it into existing properties, they will tend economically to expel the workers to the periphery, conveniently putting ‘those people’ out of sight, out of mind:
A view of the upscale community of Mango Walk (left) and the squatter settlement of Shanty Town, Montego Bay, just across the road, which is devaluing properties, in Mango Walk, and is causing grave concerns by many persons. – File
Some of the gated communities display genuine concern for the settlers and so initiate Peace Management Initiatives and other interventions, while others don’t care.
Put very poor people in close proximity to each other, and to rich people, and violence ensues, as so memorably sung by Jimmy Cliff in the breakthrough film The Harder They Come:
I said the oppressors are trying to keep me down
Trying to drive me underground
But they think they’re gonna have the battle won
I say forgive them Lord, they know not what they’ve done
But as sure as the sun will shine
I’m gonna get my share of what’s mine
I said the harder they come
The harder they fall, one and all (Ohh, ohh, ohh)
I said the harder they come
Harder they fall, one and all (Yeah, yeah, yeah)
Break it down!
On the ride to a better life? Jimmy Cliff in Harder They Come
Add to that
Getting high on life? Bob Marley
Both gated and settlers are trapped, ultimate fighters, locked at the wrist in a death duel. The trap is called underdevelopment. Its most visible members are donmanship in the settlements and private security behind the gates, disfigured progeny of corrupt ancestry.
If you haven’t heard of donmanship (I hadn’t), here’s a Gleaner extract from 2002:
Donmanship gone a school. There is growing terrorist extortion in schools. Other students are being forced by the student dons to pay taxes for right of passage and presence or the victims dare not turn up at school. Like in the protection rackets on the streets, fear of reprisal shelters the extortion from exposure.
I’ve previously posted about how childhood poverty damages your mind, and perpetuates a cycle of poverty, how slums are slums are houses of crime , and how some people are a slum’s winners.
A few weeks ago, a grieving family had to bury their bright, ambitious, peace-keeping daughter who was stabbed to death at school while trying to pacify a fight. Whole armouries of weapons are seized in some institutions and there have been arrests of students for guns and ammunition. The police could profitably open a special statistical category for school-related crimes including an increasing number of murder cases.
A slum in
Poverty and lack of education tie to crime, via drugs:
There is ganja at Munro – and everywhere else. There is booze (as The Sunday Gleaner has recently documented), and there is every other kind of drug readily available. Not only is there widespread use but students are peddlers on campus.
Mr. Cunningham evidently comes to housing via workforce development. He’s a former managing director of Sugar Industry Housing Limited (SIHL), which:
The Sugar Industry Housing Ltd. (SIHL) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sugar Industry Authority and its mandate is to provide for the housing needs of the workers in the industry.
Increasingly I’m becoming convinced that in fusion countries, if municipal is politically weak or has a shortage of banking and financing expertise, the best approach is a direct partnership between the dominant employer, the poor, and a financial backing agency (whether domestic or international). Mr. Cunningham evidently shares that view:
But suppose we create a different vision, where there is no fundamental distinction between settlement or gated, where both share basic facilities and amenities of identical standard, so that:
Scandal bag waste disposal no longer coexists with “Bed, Bath & Beyond”
In
Flying toilets, Kibera
Nor are the public conveniences any better.
Think that’s clean?
Potable water is commonly available.
Stealing water from the pipe
When it rains there is no fear of drowning or land slippage, because the site is on rocky ground, not a riverbed, nor is it in a flood prone depression.
Slums in
Where no gated visitor to a settlement ever has to cry real tears because he never believed that fellow Jamaicans could live in such squalor.
Child in
(More great photos by James Willamor may be found here.)
A little-publicised development in Old Harbour, called Old Harbour Glades, to mark its evolution from the bad lands of Succaba Settlement, has boldly achieved much of that vision and, remarkably, it has done so with solutions which have resulted in the Government being fully repaid for its input of land and services and with no significant overruns, so the escalation clause in nearly 2,000 purchase contracts in seven phases; A1, A2, B, C, D, E, E1 averaging 250 lots each, has never been used. How did this come about?
How hard did it come?
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
