Gareth Manning, Sunday Gleaner Reporter

Senior Superintendent Derrick 'Cowboy' Knight. - File

As children we were often told the story of the three little pigs, who, after being weaned by their mother, went out into the world to start life on their own.

The first two built their houses of twigs and straw. Then along came a big bad wolf that blew the houses down and ate up the little pigs. But the third little pig built his house of bricks shutting out the ferocious brute.

Successive Jamaican governments have had an attitude to development not much different from that of two of the little pigs who built their houses of straw and twigs.

They have failed to plan properly - thinking mainly of the immediate and short term - leaving people vulnerable to the ravages of external and internal forces. Among some of those failures has been a failure to develop sufficient housing over the years in spite of moves to urbanise sections of the country, causing a rash growth in hundreds of squatter communities across the island that are now hotbeds of crime, general social disorder and which contribute to economic degradation.

The most recent study shows there are 595 of these communities housing anywhere between 15 and 20 per cent of Jamaica's population. People seeking opportunities in areas that were experiencing an economic boom developed them, physical planners say. Tourism has been a major contributor to the economic growth attracting job seekers who are drawn like moths to a lamp. But it lured them with very little care for their living conditions, forcing many to 'capture' land and sprout cardboard-like houses that now rim our coastal areas.

The communities themselves are often poor, lacking basic amenities, such as potable water, electricity and roads that trap residents in and keep outsiders out. Thus, policing is a problem here. The lack of roads denies all emergency services access. So the people develop their own ways of reaching to the amenities they need most, and their own rules for survival.

Superintendent in charge of Clarendon Police, Derrick Knight, in a recent interview gave a vivid description:

Social Amenities

"There is no road. The lighting is limited, there is no water. As a matter of fact, there is no sky. If you look in the sky what you see is only web from the wire that they run from all about, thieving light in these area ... Even if some of the places have roads, they are filled with craters. The social amenities are almost non-existent in most of these areas and these are things that fester and lead to crime."

They contribute between 70 and 75 per cent to the crime problem in some of the most volatile parishes such as St. Catherine, Clarendon and St. James, the police say, and are contributing significantly to a growing crime trend in parishes such as St. Ann.

They degrade the environment too as environmentalists and parish council authorities have often argued. Garbage trucks are a rare phenomenon in many of these communities because of their inaccessibility, forcing people to deal with refuse in the most convenient way they know - that of dumping them in gullies where they will be out of sight and out of mind. But whereas garbage trucks are not an every day happening, pit latrines and plastic bags of human excrement are often catapulted from the concrete and board structures with little worry over where they land. The muck seeps into water sources, killing fish and contaminating water supply.

With the current government's tourism expansion programme fully under way, squatter settlements are set to mushroom even further. Those fears are already being realised in Runaway Bay, St. Ann, where the controversial Bahía Príncipe hotel is situated. Authorities there say the numbers of squatter settlements have risen since the construction of the hotel as people have poured into the area in search of employment. Simultaneously, crime has risen in the parish, the police say, particularly robberies and murders.

In St. James, the correlation between development and the growth in squatter communities is clearest. Chairman of the Parish Development Committee, Mark Kerr- Jarrett, notes that many of the informal communities there were developed during the birth of tourism in Montego Bay in the 1960s. They have churned out some 20,000 jobs but very little housing for their employees, resulting in the creation of unplanned communities such as Flankers, Norwood, Farm Heights, Rose Heights and Salt Spring, which are now premiere hot spots in the parish. The stories are similar in St. Catherine, Clarendon and St. Andrew.

The current government suffers from the same myopia as its predecessors. It developed a plan to attract major hotel investment but failed to incorporate how it would house the thousands of people for whom the investments were intended to create jobs. This was done in spite of the fact that the country was already facing a housing blight with an average of 40,000 new houses needed annually.

Holistic Development

Physical planners Desmond Hall and Audrey Thomas were quite right when they said that governments on this island need to approach development more holistically. Investment can no longer be pursued in isolation, but rather, government has to consult fully and partner with development agencies in the public and private sectors to ensure all the necessary infrastructure is in place to facilitate its sustainability. It is clear the burden of providing housing cannot be the Government's business alone, after all it took them 20 years to clear only about half of the housing backlog. It should have made the effort to consult with investors and members of the private sector to see how best it could come up with the capital to provide affordable housing for the droves of people who are expected to migrate in search of employment.

But expansion is already under way and what might be best for the government to do now is to find ways of influencing members of the private sector to revive the rental market, like Hall and Thomas have suggested. This would provide housing particularly for those who cannot afford to buy new houses or who intend to work seasonally.

It needs, even more urgently, to regularise squatter communities and partner with agencies to have these communities fitted with all the social and basic utilities in order to restore humanity to the people and their communities. Surveys have shown that most residents are willing to pay for their plot of land so long as they can afford it on their low-income budgets. This will go a long way in helping to shut out some of our own wolves such as crime.

In that breath, the Government must be lauded for making a first step in establishing the Squatter Management Unit. The unit works closely with agencies such as the National Housing Trust, the National Environment and Planning Agency, the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management and the police to stem the growth of squatter settlements, particularly in the parishes of Clarendon and St. Catherine. But the work of the unit needs to be put on the fast track. It needs to be spread urgently to resort areas as well where the growth of informal settlements is threatening the sustenance of tourism. Again, a partnership with the private sector will help provide the capital to facilitate this move.

Better land management also needs to come into play. Government needs to find creative and more sound ways of using land so land is always available for housing. Hotels should also be a part of the development package working closely with the National Housing Trust and National Housing Development Corporation.

Tourism Master Plan

The tourism master plan and the tourism/bauxite expansion study also need to be consulted. These plans clearly outline what needs to be done with regard to housing during the expansion programme and they need to be followed.

The latter of the two studies, in particular, warned that because of the current largely uncontrolled patterns of development, resort towns could be quickly transformed by both formal and informal housing when the hotels were completed. It added that informal communities would create an enormous burden on both local and national governments.

"It will be desirable for local new employees to remain in the communities where they now live, while new housing developments should be incorporated into existing communities or Brownfield sites. This will necessitate rapid, targeted attention to local development plans and prioritise improvements to local road conditions and other infrastructure," the study recommended. These proposals have been ignored in the main.

Foresight has been lacking in this country for too long. It is time the current administration learns from the mistakes of past governments.

gareth.manning@gleanerjm.com