THE EDITOR, Sir:HUMAN DIGNITY and well-being require decent living conditions. It is only right that governments be concerned with the conditions in which their poor live.
The Patterson administration has plans for an ambitious low-income housing project in Downtown Kingston. As intended and if properly executed, this is to be of tremendous benefit to the inner-city's poor and could help reverse the landscape of decay in the nation's capital. Improperly executed, many of the potential benefits may never be realised.
Though it won't be easy, the government needs to get this one right. Before anything else, it must be understood that improving people's living conditions is about more than mortar and bricks. Many low-income housing projects have been examples of fine edifices failing to improve the living conditions of their residents, rather becoming nothing more than monuments to poverty and deprivation. A survey of public housing projects in the wealthiest of nations will provide spectacular examples. More recent thinking has shifted from mass housing solutions to the problem of low-income housing. Increasingly, alternatives are being sought that emphasise the community and social aspects of living over the mere availability of physical facilities. Creative solutions have included subsidising the cost of housing in middle-income neighbourhoods to qualified low-income families, or promoting mixed-income housing developments.
MOVEMENT
Movement away from mass housing specifically for low-income families recognises the weakness of confining the poor to live in very dense homogeneous settings, usually in geographically well-defined (or physically segregated) areas and usually lacking surrounding infrastructure conducive to upward mobility. Clusters of low-income housing are typically characterised by limited access to vibrant job opportunities, to good schools, and to proper health care institutions. Little or no meaningful political clout surfaces in the form of poor city services. Infrequent garbage collection, poorly maintained roads, inadequate street lighting, and very few or no parks and greenspace, are just some of the ills that are likely to prevail in low-income neighbourhoods.
POLITICAL REALITIES
When you add acute political realities to the mix, making mass public housing successful becomes an even more difficult proposition in Jamaica. No matter how well-meaning, the government is restricted in its ability to preside over the fair development and distribution of public housing. That is as much a criticism of the government's abilities as it is a plain concession to factors outside of its control. All this may sound excessively pessimistic about the prospects of the government's planned $5 billion housing project. But it is not to say failure is inevitable, it is to acknowledge that the government has to be extremely judicious in carrying out its ambitions if it is to avoid spending $5 billion to do nothing more than further entrench the Trench Town concept. Even as I am fully aware of the difficulties, I am hopeful that the government finds a way to succeed in using this project to improve the conditions in which Downtown's poor live.
I am, etc.,
SHELDON LYN
sllyn@hotmail.com
Via Go-Jamaica
