Martin HenryA DEFINING characteristic of the ghetto is that it leaks. There is a net outflow of money, resources and talent, whatever inputs are made. This is not just the deprived and decaying inner city. In a sense, the whole country has been ghettoised. The deprivation and decay of inner-city communities was no inevitable fate.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Last week The Gleaner carried a photograph of the JPSCo, with police cover, dismantling illegal electrical connections in Allman Town. The residence in the picture was the remnant of a formerly elegant two-storey house with stylish fretwork. It is now a tumble-down structure waiting to fall down on its occupants as has happened elsewhere. To complement that telling photograph, a resident of the area was reported as saying to the effect that Government can't expect poor people to pay light bill. Allman Town was once a prime upscale residential area, as were many other towns ringing the Kingston City centre.
A poignant description of Rae Town, past and present was carried last Thursday in The Gleaner in a story 'Rae Town: The Rebirth of Hope' the rebirth of hope that the beauty of Rae Town and other depressed communities would again flourish. The story said older residents who know better days have been surrounded by poverty and decay in the community for so long that their only comfort has been photographs, taken years ago. These reminded them that Rae Town was once a beautiful residential area, not a place where a basic school and community centre are home to seven families, where unemployment, gang activities and illiteracy flourish and where they watch the light die out of the eyes of academically brilliant students and budding musicians, robbed of the opportunity for great achievement.
The middle class has fled from these areas. Businesses have fled. Infrastructure private and public property has decayed. Services have been scaled back. The parish of Kingston (not the city) is the only parish showing population decline. Why all of this? The Prime Minister knows why. Mr. Patterson, who is personally leading yet another drive for urban renewal beginning with Rae Town, has been in politics for a generation. He has firsthand knowledge of, and some complicity in, how the struggle by hostile tribes for scarce benefits (his words) has influenced inner city and national decay through the leaking away of resources.
Renewal requires stanching that flow, not just making new inputs. There have been massive inflows of resources into ghetto communities and into the ghettoised nation. Over and above special development projects, on and off over the last generation, including the construction of tribal housing stocks, the greatest concentration of government institutions, of schools, and industry in the country, as I keep pointing out, is in the belt from Rockfort in the East to Six Miles in the West running south of Cross Roads. In addition to considerable public resources, there have been the inflows of local philanthropy and of overseas remittances to which the gun trade, by the way, is tied. Despite high unemployment, people work and hustle, so there is an income inflow as well.
The problem is the resources do not stick. Inner-city economies and social structure have been widely and deeply studied in the United States. One key finding is the failure of capital formation in these communities. Massive amounts of money do in fact enter but pass through and out very rapidly with little internal circulation. What does not happen is investment in the community for employment creation, growth and incremental prosperity. The lack of property ownership, particularly personal home ownership is a powerful disincentive against economic and social stakes in the community. Crime and violence scares away investment and stifles development. A vicious downward spiral of decay, poverty and violence sets in.
A pathetically powerful exemplary story to the point appears in They cry respect: urban violence and poverty in Jamaica. I have often referred to and quoted from this local benchmark 1996 study by the Centre for Population, Community and Social Change at the UWI, Mona. Harry, a proud and talented child of the ghetto, a reader and thinker with five dictionaries, gave up his neck-tied job as a supervisor in a clothing store downtown, sold his car and pumped $100,000 into a business in his community to become somebody. Thugs beat and chased away the telephone installation technicians so his business could not obtain a phone line.
Harry himself was attacked and robbed, with the police failing to respond. Outsiders could not enter the area to patronise his business. The stark options Harry felt he had were, to get out or kill. This now bitter, ambitious entrepreneur asked himself how he could have been so blind. I recommend that Prime Minister Patterson and his urban renewal team and the people in the target communities read They cry respect before moving one inch further.
The country too has received major inflows. Independence came with tourism and bauxite and a vibrant little manufacturing sector to complement the traditional agricultural economy. Remittances have poured in to the point where Jamaica is one of the top destinations for Western Union money transfer outside of its North American domestic market. We have been the beneficiaries of more loans and grants than anybody can keep track of. USAID alone has given us US$2.5 billion since 1962 ($115 billion in today's dollars bigger than last year's total budget!).
Returning residents are bringing substantial amounts of hard currency in; and I haven't said anything yet about the inflows of ganja money. Yet, year after year, the cry is about the trade deficit (shopping outside the ghetto), the lack of economic growth (the failure to invest resource inputs in the ghetto), and the debt (stealing utilities in the ghetto that someone else in this case, future generations has to pay for). The root of the Prime Minister's tasks for urban and national renewal is to de-ghettoise the inner city and the country. The environment for businesses like Harry's needs to be greatly improved. Incentives for internal capital formation and investments must be greatly improved.
In the case of the inner city, in particular, the free movement of people, goods and services must be restored. The security of life and property must be guaranteed. We are talking about a restoration of a climate of law and order and the protection of human rights which are the primary duties of the Government and the foundation for a peaceful and prosperous society.
That photographed, fine, but now rotting house in Allman Town is almost certainly property abandoned by owners under the duress of force and violence, direct or indirect, and subsequently captured. Harry's small business lies in ruins too for the same reasons. Very much like environmental and also medical restoration, urban and national renewal will best take place when the causes of degradation are removed and natural processes are encouraged and allowed to produce healing, even where external assistance is required.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
