Melville Cooke
THERE IS an open lot in Havendale, St. Andrew, that I have had an eye on for some time. Not an eye to purchase, but an eye to how it was kept. It was never allowed to get unkempt and either the neighbours were very watchful or the owners were on the ball, as it was never allowed to become a dumping ground.
It is a dumping ground of another sort now, though, as loads of sand have been put down for construction. However, judging by heavy-duty tarring machine I have seen, it is not going to be a 'house house', but a set of apartments or townhouses.
Another set, I should say, as apart from the mansions on the hills, the new construction I have seen in the capital is geared towards multiple dwellings.
It is inevitable, I suppose, as more and more people come into the city, that housing developers would wish to maximise the earning potential of land, that very limited resource which cannot be replicate or substituted. Plus, with the crime rate being as high as it is, many prefer to live in a gated community, which is almost invariably a set of apartments or townhouses, or simply somewhere that they can scream help and have a reasonable chance of being heard.
AMAZING TRANSFORMATION
I did not realise how far the 'apartmentisation' (to coin a word) of the capital had gone until I started thinking about what will happen with this lot. Then I really started to look at places like Dilsbury Avenue and Kingsway Avenue, which are filled with multiple household dwellings, and realised (I know, silly me) that they were not like that originally. There were, in fact, single family bungalow houses which were destroyed and the land space maximised.
(Isn't it amazing how large an apartment or set of townhouses can be built where a house was before? It really makes a 'lot' of land look like a lot.)
But I believe this 'apartmentisation' has serious implications for the quality of life of the people who will live in the multiple household dwellings, especially the children. Sure, there are green (or asphalt) spaces, but the child who grows up in a house that you cannot walk around is missing out on a whole lot of life. I remember passing the high-rise buildings in Southside, downtown Kingston, looking at the children way up on the steps and thinking 'damn, at least they are not afraid of heights'.
STANDARD JOKE
However, they are not accustomed to open spaces and I believe this has a lot to do with the quality of a person's outlook. Live in a small space, think small; live in a large space, think bigger. Maybe overly simplistic, but I think it generally holds true.
It is like how 'town' and 'country' (and although I live in Kingston I was born in and still treasure the rural side of life) people see distances differently. There is the standard joke about a person from Kingston driving somewhere out of town and asking someone how far it is to his or her destination. "Jus a mile dung de road," he or she is told. That person drives more than a mile and is told by someone else 'jus a mile'. And on the person goes until he or she has travelled about 12 miles.
I once lived in an apartment, an uptown tenement, and I consider quite a few to be like that, despite the occupants not sharing standpipes or toilets. There is still wrangling over parking space, hearing space (as in noise levels) and just space in general, which is what tenements are really about.
What I find amusing, though, is the names that some of the apartments and townhouses are given. I have seen many a 'manor', a 'mews', an 'estate' and a 'place', but the one that really got me was the 'chateau'.
No matter the name, living in a small space with hardly anywhere for the children to play is the same.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
