[Previous Months In Review available here: May 09, Apr 09, Mar 09, Feb 09, Jan 09]

Although yesterday’s half of the June review included nothing but bad news of valuable innovations broken or disrupted, the month also included stories showing that Schumpeter was right: some things deserve to be broken.

Too  bad for you who deserve to be broken

One of them is poverty-concentrated family high-rises with direct public ownership, as explored in End of an error: Part 1, demolishing the inessential past, and Part 2, envisioning the essential future:

Remarkably, wonderfully, Atlanta has succeeded in doing just that:

Now, Atlanta is nearing a very different record: becoming the first major city to knock them all down. By next June, officials here plan to demolish the city’s last remaining housing project, fulfilling a long and divisive campaign to reduce poverty by decentralizing it.

Amazing how much inaccurate oversimplification can be packed into a single phrase. Allow me to explode it:

Taking it apart takes it to pieces

Long. Yes. Demolishing Atlanta’s public housing took over a decade, a process begun with the HOPE VI redevelopment of part of Techwood Homes into Centennial Place for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.

Divisive. By definition, I suppose, anything that lacks unanimity could be seen as divisive. In my experience, demolition of obsolete and decrepit public housing is divisive only in that some few people – residents, some resident advocates – raise a ruckus, or express a litany of conditional doubts, views we’ll see echoed throughout the Times’ article.

Reduce poverty. Wrong – that’s not why public housing is deconcentrated – indeed, it’s not the raison d’etre of public housing at all. Public housing exists to house the poor in decent, safe, and sanitary accommodations, to create the opportunity for poverty reduction but not to do it directly. The purpose of deconcentrating public housing is simply to move people out of unacceptable housing into better housing, better neighborhoods, with better schools.

Beyond Schumpeter, things break not solely by accident by occasionally through deliberate action under the banner of progress, or what the ruling authorities deem to be progress.

Is that progress behind you a mushroom cloud?

One such hanging in the balance is the grim case of Kashgar and the Chinese government in Creative destruction, or destructive creations? Part 1, out with the old?, and Part 2, in with the new? :

Shades of the slums inside, in Paris and around the world.

What will remain of old Kashgar is unclear. Mr. Xu said that “important buildings and areas of the Old City have already been included in the country’s special preservation list” and would not be disturbed.

No archaeologists monitor the razings, he said, because the government already knows everything about old Kashgar.

Nice to be omniscient.

Trust me, I have your best interests at heart

Rusticity is attractive when you can go home to your gleaming downtown hotel, your ceramic bathroom, and your piping hot shower.

In Mr. Xu’s view, demolition will give the Uighurs a better life and spare them from disaster in one fell swoop.

All that said, there is a certain aura of forcible eviction about the demolition, an urgency that fear of earthquakes does not completely explain. The city is offering cash bonuses to residents who move out early — about $30 for those who vacate within 20 days; $15 if they move in a month.

By itself, that’s not so terrible, even if it smacks of the self-fulfilling blight creation of which the developer of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards property has been accused.

[Editorial note for Atlantic Yard junkies: Mr. Oder continues to be on a roll. Check out these posts. – Ed.]

Homes are razed as soon as they become empty, giving some alleys a gap-tooth look.

We’ve seen before that Chinese developers have what we would consider a cavalier attitude to property rights, changing facts on the ground to erode the political and topographic support for the status quo.

From sixteenth to twenty-first century: Kashgar at twilight

Although all decisions involving housing are inherently place-based, land being housing’s least-changeable element, physical configuration is next in importance, and extremely enduring, as explored in Retrofitting informal housing, together with other speculations on the relationship between configuration, affordability, and livability in The Model T house?, Little boxes, little boxes, and I hope you’re not what you live in!:

If we want to make housing affordable, shouldn’t we be looking at inexpensive construction materials?  That’s the premise of a short Climate Progress article, Shipping containers provide affordable housing, from the Center for American Progress’s “It’s Easy Being Green” series.

There’s an emerging and innovative solution to the environmental, economic, and housing concerns we face around the globe: shipping container homes.

Few shipping containers come with nice large portholes – not cheap!

It turns out reusing the old containers is an inexpensive, efficient, and environmentally friendly way to build homes that can be used by low-income residents or as temporary housing following a natural disaster.

(Readers must make due allowance for the credulous gee-whiz writing, which flits lightly over numerous practical problems, as we’ll see.)

And that’s how you turn tin cans into homes!

Looking beyond the US, we examined the case of Development done right in Jamaica? Part 1, the gates of exclusion, and Part 2, the mix of inclusion:

In yesterday’s blog post, we heard from Jamaican columnist and developer/ architect Carlton Cunningham, whose his mid-April Gleaner column describes his successful housing development, Old Harbour Glades, that has apparently replaced “the bad lands of Succaba Settlement”:

“Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail in shanty town”

His summary of how it was done, and why it worked, reads like extracts from an AHI manual of successful mixed-income affordable development in the global South:

[1] There was a master plan which included well-designed drains, high-quality central sewage treatment (tertiary level, meaning the effluent is clean water) and abundance of potable water from a dedicated well.

There ain’t no such thing as free infrastructure, and government must lead by creating an enabling rather than disabling environment:

[2] To counter the negative connotations of the squatter settlement and its strong correlation with crime and disorder, regular plots with full access to services were allocated to the poor and to the squatters.

The term of art is ’sites and stands,’ and we’ve seen it around the world

New construction public housing, Spanish Town, Kingston, Jamaica

A regular grid of dirt roads.

[3] The next mission was to make the serviced plots affordable, through creative finance.

‘Creative’ is here a synonym for ‘efficiently subsidized’ … but that’s okay, affordable housing always costs money.

How much housing can I afford?

Late in the month, I laid out not only a prediction but also its evidence in Why Larry Summers won’t be the next Fed chairman:

Mr. Orszag can be gracious, having one his turf skirmish of the right of access.

“He enriches any discussion he participates in, which is particularly valuable given the complexity and importance of the challenges currently facing us.”

Translation: We cannot dump him now, since he’s enthroned and is better inside the tent pissing out.

Point it away from me, okay?

Mr. Summers, the only top economic adviser with a West Wing office, sees the president more than the others and controls the daily economic briefings. By all accounts he has worked hard to disprove early talk that he would not be good at the job, even poking fun at himself.

Just one big happy family, with Summers as the funnyman?

But, Mr. Geithner said, that trait makes Mr. Summers a good director of the economic council because “he is better than anybody else on the planet at framing the case for and against any particular issue and reducing something to a set of concrete options.”

Framing the case for and against? Doesn’t sound like a Fed Chairman to me, sounds like someone the President wants to keep on a close leash.

Somebody doesn’t want Mr. Summers to be Fed Chairman. Maybe that somebody is the President.

“Maybe.  Maybe not.”

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Who, me? 

Busted things dominated June’s posts, a trend of which I was unaware until compiling the month-in-review.  June was busting up all over, starting with the sad spectacle of properties less costly demolished than boarded up, in Plowing it under: Part 1, the why, and Part 2, the how:

The same walkaway – rational, you understand, and completely predictable – occurred by the Victorville developer because the arithmetic collapsed:

The developer of the Victorville project had hoped to sell the houses for more than $300,000 as they were being built last year, Forrester said.

That’s the completed and sold cost.  Project (say) $50,000 apiece in costs to renovate.

But reality quickly diverged from that vision. Home prices have tanked faster in San Bernardino County than any other Southern California county during the downturn. In March, the median home sale price for the county was $160,000, down 43% in a year, according to the San Diego-based research firm MDA DataQuick.

Project (say) a 40% price drop, over $125,000 gone.

Project (say) $50,000 in fines to the cash-strapped town of Victorville (all towns are cash-strapped).  There goes your equity: poof!

Money all gone!

But Victorville city spokeswoman Yvonne Hester said the bank decided not to throw good money after bad.

“It just didn’t pencil out for them,” she said. “They’d have to spend a lot of money to turn around and sell the houses. They just made a financial decision to just demolish them.”

Not penciling out?

Curious how Ms. Hester forgets to mention the $1,000-per-day fines that she had the power to levy.

Empty houses aren’t simply a target of penalizing local governments, they are also conveniently clandestine places for atrocities such as that inflicted on illegal immigrants in Tucson, profiled in Dead-drop housing: Part 1, the value chain, and Part 2, the surcharge:

In Part 1 I derived an estimate of 54,000 immigrants flowing through Phoenix a year.

The arteries of a money-extraction system

Let’s assume an average surcharge of $3,000 – that’s only a 300% markup from the loss-leader price – so that the whole extraction is $4,000 per customer.  Multiply times 54,000 immigrants a year and the Phoenix Pipeline is producing $200,000,000 annually.

The marginal Gross Operating Profit therefrom is staggering. 

At the West Lumbee Street house raided twice in two months, the owners, Pablo and Ana Maria Sandoval, had moved to a larger home and were eager to find a tenant [for their former home, which they have obviously been unable to sell – Ed.] to help them pay the mortgage. They rented the house out for $1,200 a month.

At $1,200 per month divided by 15 hostages per month, the per-hostage holding costs are a mere $80, or $4,000,000 in annual rent paid.  While that’s huge – large enough, certainly, to have a substantial impact on the Phoenix single-family rental marketplace – it’s less than 2% of the marginal revenue from each additional hostage.

Such margins will pay for a lot of front couple cut-outs to rent empty houses, a lot of realtors scouting likely incurious or desperate homeowners, a lot of casual surveillance of police routes.

To the critical market-behavior insight of Hyman Minsky – that protracted stability creates its own instability –

Hyman Minsky never wrote that protracted blogging also leads to instability

– we must add an unexpected corollary – that sudden instability oscillates into even greater instability, in two-part pity-the-poor-appraiser post, Driving through the rear-view mirror: Part 1, info under the influence:

A typical single-family loan is the least of three numbers:

1. Coverage-capped. A percentage of the borrower’s income.

2. Price-capped. A percentage of the sale price.

3. Value-capped. A stipulated Loan-to-value (LTV) ratio.

This being a typical single-family, the lender’s is probably at 80% LTV. At an appraised value of $750,000, the loan will be capped at $600,000; at $700,000 appraised, the loan will be $560,000 –- $40,000 less.

So now we have three possible outcomes:

1. Seller takes $50,000 lower price.

2. Buyer comes up with $190,000 of down payment, $40,000 more than originally anticipated.

3. A new or revised appraisal miraculously rediscovers the original $750,000 price, and the sale proceeds as negotiated.

Which do you think the seller and buyer are rooting for?

We’re rooting for the appraisers’ home team

and Part 2, info over the transom:

In yesterday’s exploration of the changing appraisal world, using an interesting Wall Street Journal article, we’d identified the intrinsic challenge of appraisal – having to simulate a forward-looking market by using exclusively backward-looking evidence from past sales. Called upon to appraise a pending sale, the appraiser is in a really weird position:

·         She has to simulate actions of hypothetical people buying and selling a property

·         Somehow overlooking that there are, in fact, actual people who are buying and selling that same property.

“What you are doing is irrelevant,” says the appraiser. “I have to figure out what rational people would do.”

Who are you going to believe, your lying eyes or me?

Aside from disruptions in the use and tenure of owned homes, financial disruption also disrupts delivery systems, as explored in depth in Re-engineering the LIHTC value chain: Part 1, it’s broken, and Part 2, it may not self-repair, and Part 3, it’s fixable:

So far, in the two posts expanding upon my analytical essay Rethinking and Reengineering the LIHTC Value Chain [.pdf, and worth downloading in full – Ed.], originally published on my for-profit company’s Web site and its email distribution list, we saw that (Part 1) the US’s multifamily rental affordable housing finance ecosystem got disrupted by the capital markets, and that (Part 2) Congress’s solution – a combination of ‘buying back’ previously issued but unsold LIHTC and delivering gap financing for the lost value – will probably help the current pipeline but undermines the value chain’s ability to self-repair.

That’s not going to fix itself, is it?

[Editor's note: for a step-by-step primer on the mechanics of LIHTC allocation, click here.]

Why won’t the system repair itself?

A similar disrupted value chain, this one mixing physical property and the capital markets, arose in new York City as chronicled in Risks of soft equity when markets seize up: Part 1, the neatness of Section 421-a, and Part 2, the messiness of market crunches:

You wouldn’t think that delays in financing a downtown luxury tower would stop in its tracks an affordable property in the Bronx, but such is the nature of sophisticated financial ecosystems that everything can influence everything else.  [As my friend Shekar Narasimhan has pointed out, when Lehman went under, it filed bankruptcy in 56 countries, and the next day a mixed-use development in Shanghai stopped dead. – Ed.]

I’m counting on you to know what the other hand is doing

While as a general principle I love market-oriented mechanisms for affordable housing – investment tax credits sold for soft equity, inclusionary zoning calibrated to deliver affordability in exchange for increasing density – it’s undeniable that they have one vulnerability: when the market seizes up, every link in the value chain can snap.  (This problem is currently hitting the LIHTC, as we’ve chronicled.)  The result of a credit crunch is a financial pileup in slow motion that hits everybody, including those who thought their financing immune, as illustrated by an intra-developer litigation highlighted in The New York Observer:

It worked great when we were all zooming along

Although it’s unimportant to us who is or might be right in the litigation, understanding it will take us into not just the capital markets but also the intricacies of New York City’s innovative approach to inclusionary zoning linkage (connecting market development with incremental affordable housing) via the Section 421-a program.

Section 421-a is a beautifully simple concept akin to Mumbai’s Transferable Development Rights.  A form of inclusionary zoning, it requires that:

[D]evelopers roughly between 14th and 96th Streets (the “exclusion zone”) would have to contribute to affordable housing in order to receive a tax break.

[Extensive snip]

There we have it – disruption in the credit markets, coupled with Atlantic Development’s reliance on the sale of its 421-a certificates, puts not just this property but the whole company in peril.

We put all our eggs in one basket

Fortunately, not everything posted in June dealt with good things that are broken:

You promise the second half is less depressing?

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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Because you are what you live in, urbanization requires formality:

But as cities imply increasing physical density (more cubic space per square foot of land area), we have to go up, and many an informal settlement is constructed of materials too flimsy to support a higher story: we have to make the informal house into an embryo house. This is a challenge in architecture, one taken up by two architects, whose efforts are profiled in an intriguing blog post from De Zeen Design Magazine:

Architects Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson have developed a strategy to develop informal slums into permanent urban districts through a process of gradual improvement to existing dwellings instead of demolition and rebuilding.

Architect’s vision, fusing CAD/CAM with photography

Since cities are messy and people need different configurations at different points in their lives, formalizing the existing requires multiple options.

“Aerial collage: the new archipelago of incremented kaccha houses rising from a sea of well-built permanent homes in a typical slum.”

The architects have developed three house typologies consisting of simple frames that allow for later expansion.

It’s absolutely critical that houses be expandable. As the authors write:

We developed three basic prototypes for the slum dwellers to choose from.

House A is a two story home, structured like a three-story home to ensure safety in future vertical extension.

House A: two stories, maybe plus one?

House B has an incrementable ground floor, which is left open for either parking or for the family to turn that open space into a shop.

House B: ground floor room to expand?

House C has an incrementable middle floor, to hang clothes or to be used like a living room.

House C: ground floor room to expand?

All proposals are for one family and 270 sq foot area (grant regulations).

As Frank Lloyd Wright found when experimenting with his Usonian house, the discipline of keeping to limited materials and low construction cost forces great architectural creativity:

Wright’s Usonian House: motivated by low cost and affordability

It’s a challenge to squeeze all the uses into a tiny space.

Making every square foot count

“After creating works for Rem Koolhaas at OMA/ AMO, Neutelings Riedijk, NL architects, and Thomas Sandell, I found it essential to search for the opposite experience: to work for the ones who cannot pay,” says Balestra.

As a pro-poor consultant myself, I like their thinking; regardless of how much they pay, they are your customers, and you never tell your customer what to want.

The strategy strengthens the informal and aims to accelerate the legalization of the homes of the urban poor.

In September 2008, architects Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson were invited by Sheela Patel and Jockin Arputham (www.sparcindia.org) to come to India to design an Incremental Housing Strategy. The strategy had to be implementable anywhere.

Sheela Patel of SPARC, taken in at SDI’s July, 2008 London meeting

Recently we hosted an AHI Exchange with Sheela and Liverpool’s Andrea Titterington, on the subject of the community’s role in complex urban regeneration.

The communities are asked to engage with the construction process to customize each house, i.e. each family will paint the house the color they want. After all, who knows better than the people themselves how do they want to live?

As Andrea put it at the AHI Exchange, quoting a community group she was working with, “Nothing about us, without us, is for us.”

These architects used active community involvement in designing their modules:

Everybody gets to move the blocks around

Soon after Filipe and Sara arrived to Bombay, a team of international architects, urban planners, landscape architects and graphic designers volunteered to set up the strategy which uses the existing urban formations as starting point for development. Organic patterns that have evolved during time are preserved and existing social networks are respected. Neighbors remain neighbors, local remains local.

Harnessing the wisdom of slum dwellers

When Filipe and Sara started working they did not know the Indian government would initiate a grant of 4500 euro/ family for the incrementation of their homes at a national scale. The grant is now active and it can be given to any family who lives in a kaccha – an old temporary structure, not suitable for living.

‘Not suitable’? The longer I work in this arena internationally, the less willing I am to declare any particular form of housing ‘unacceptable,’ simply because there’s always something worse, and something better, in the same country or a neighboring one.

Life in a kaccha: unsuitable, or better than the alternatives?

The goal is an ever-evolving, ever-improving housing environment, and the only thing varying from place to place is the urgency of making that improvement.

Suitability is in the beholder’s eye and varies from place to place

While keeping the community intact …

It is called City In-Situ Rehabilitation Scheme for Urban Poor Staying in Slums in City of Pune Under BSUP, JNNURM.

Be it ever so humble, it’s all the home some people have

A pilot project will be implemented in Pune, India but the architects believe the strategy could be appropriate in any country with similar urban conditions.

I’m skeptical as to the practical economics and construction logistics – but who cares about my skepticism? This is what pilots are for.

First you have to believe!

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“Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail in shanty town”

His summary of how it was done, and why it worked, reads like extracts from an AHI manual of successful mixed-income affordable development in the global South:

Carlton Cunningham has a vision

[1] There was a master plan which included well-designed drains, high-quality central sewage treatment (tertiary level, meaning the effluent is clean water) and abundance of potable water from a dedicated well.

There ain’t no such thing as free infrastructure, and government must lead by creating an enabling rather than disabling environment:

[2] To counter the negative connotations of the squatter settlement and its strong correlation with crime and disorder, regular plots with full access to services were allocated to the poor and to the squatters.

The term of art is ’sites and stands,’ and we’ve seen it around the world

New construction public housing, Spanish Town, Kingston, Jamaica

A regular grid of dirt roads.

[3] The next mission was to make the serviced plots affordable, through creative finance.

‘Creative’ is here a synonym for ‘efficiently subsidized’ … but that’s okay, affordable housing always costs money.

The Old Harbour Glades project, which has provided such a glimpse into the future, is a joint venture of the Building Societies Development Limited and the Government of Jamaica (Ministry of Water and Housing and National Housing Development Corporation), financed by private sector (HG012) funds from USAID.

In this case, it comprised a system of low-interest, internationally sourced loans and the development of cross-subsidies which assisted everyone with low to moderate incomes to afford the serviced lots.

The cross-subsidies had to involve government contributing land and infrastructure cheaply or at no cost … but again, that’s fine too. 

It’s always better to give people better housing

Urban land is one of the few valuable things government can contribute off-balance-sheet, and if you can get people onto a plot of land where they have secure tenure, and at least the embryo house, they become embryo owners, and homeownership improves their civic behavior.

[4] Open-market purchasers of all income levels were invited to buy into the development whose sectors were so spaced that successive areas were priced closer and closer to full market levels.

That’s brilliant – income mixing and gradually declining purchase-price subsidy.

But, would they come? After all, social stratification is natural and Jamaicans don’t like to mix!

WRONG! They came in droves; teachers, nurses, civil servants, members of the security forces, doctors, accountants, businessmen and returning residents as well as artisans, in response to national advertisement and were selected without a single reference to politics or religion.

I can’t tell you how heartening and affirming I find Mr. Cunningham’s exuberant secularism.  At AHI lately we’ve been hosting an MIT Humphrey Fellow, Mensur Hodzic, whose dream is to use ethnically-mixed affordable housing to create a healing microcosm in blasted and divided Sarajevo in his home county of Bosnia.

Well, I try to do the things that I want
Cause when you’re dead, you know that you can’t
I’d rather be a free man in my grave
Than living as a puppet or a slave
So as sure as the sun will shine
I’m gonna get my share right of what’s mine
And then the harder they come
The harder they fall, one and all (Ohh, ohh, ohh)

Give people a subsidy, and they will come:

They came, they bought, they built.

Give people personal equity in their community, and they will build it:

And, they taught us lessons.

That’s because we Jamaicans are smart!

[1] They extracted unbelievable construction value from their NHT and building society loans.

Give people choice and they will use it.

[2] Their construction, for a decade, became a mainstay of the Old Harbour economy. They also provided continuous employment to many erstwhile squatters who viewed the newcomers as essential to their own well-being.

At Wilton Park a few weeks back, Sharad Shankardass, UN Habitat’s spokesperson, told me of his immense frustration trying to convince World Bank and other economists that economic growth by itself will not fix housing.  “Quite the reverse,” he said with as much heat as a superbly educated and cultured spokesman can manage, “housing will fix the economy!”

Hard hats = hard cash

[3] Some built cleverly appointed rental units on top of the units they occupied.

Others built inter-generational units occupied by mom dad, adult children, visiting friends and relatives, giving security for the kids, flexibility for the parents.

Throughout the world, we see that people given a monolithic configuration layout will personalize and customize it into variations of multi-family housing.  That adaptation of tenure is nothing short of critical, and part of why the embryo house is so important.

[4] Planners can take a cue, since not everyone needs to own 100% of every dwelling.

Absolutely – rental is always undervalued, because everyone wants to be a homeowner, and every politician wants to finance more homeownership.

But the greatest lesson from the transformation is that poverty is a temporary state, transition from which depends upon ability and opportunity.

With beautiful views and good services, possession of registered titles in this community is gold, even if the roads show need of repair.

AHI Affiliate Solly Angel, a land-use specialist whom I find a never-ending source of insight, has been advocating an urban-investment theory of an arterial grid of dirt roads.  He’s got a big DRAFT-DO-NOT-QUOTE written on the piece but I think it’s brilliant anyway.

Pleased to be called brilliant?  Solly Angel

Mr. Cunningham’s development is a tangible demonstration of Solly’s thesis.

So the inhabitants are not pre-occupied with conflict at the gates, but how to seize the day, transforming passive home equity into dynamic industrial wealth. Their opportunity is to unlock Hernando DeSoto’s Mystery of Capital.

The same thing applies to Nancy, who could leverage her wealth, register with NCU, become a state registered nurse and earn big money in the USA or Europe, while adding to remittances which are the mainstay of the Jamaican economy.

I’ve previously posted about remittances – we are convinced they’re the dark matter of the global south housing-economic universe. 

Instead, she was last seen in front of her substantial house waiting for a hand-out of a gas burner from Food for the Poor.

Where do they live?  Market in Spanish Town

Such are the possibilities when ordinary people acquire capital, cease to think poor, are not diverted by the daily excesses of shottas in their communities and are not depressed by the inconvenience posed by the absence of basic services. With imagination, poverty can indeed be a temporary, not a permanent or natural state.

Adds the Gleaner, with British restraint:

A new phase of the project is being planned.

Perhaps, it is worth emulation.

Cheer up, Mr. Cunningham: it’s working

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!

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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 Jamaica, February 1982, that I first became interested in the whys of affordable housing globally.  On our honeymoon, Nancy and I wandered into downtown Montego Bay, where as usual in such situations I played the local game – in this case dominos, about which Jamaicans are passionate:

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 America

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 Jamaica’s extraordinarily rich soil, so fertile for growing ganja, and you have an inflammable mixture:

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 Kingston, Jamaica

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 Africa, they’re called ‘flying toilets’.

Flying toilets, Kibera

Nor are the public conveniences any better.

Think that’s clean?  Kingston, Jamaica

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 Manila

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 Ocho Rios, Jamaica

(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.]

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