By: David A. Smith

If we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we create clean, attractive public toilets in major cities?  That question is implicit in a little New York Times deposit on the subject of effective business models for urban defecation entitled We weren’t quite ready for the modern toilet age:

The Greeley Square public restroom looks the same on the outside, but …

The state-of-the-art French automated self-cleaning pay toilets at Herald and Greeley Squares, unveiled in January 2001 with fanfare befitting a papal visit, worked about 90% of the time.

That would be good, wouldn’t it?

But that was not enough, said Daniel A. Biederman, president of the 34th Street Partnership, the business improvement district that runs the two triangular parklets north and south of West 34th Street and Broadway.

In the heart of Manhattan: Herald Square and Penn Station

The ‘parklets’ are new mini-green creations formed by blocking streets and replacing them with outdoor chairs.

Bryant Park, another recent green triangle

My friend Jockin Arputham, president of Slum Dwellers International (SDI) and proud Dharavi slum dweller, takes a Puckish delight in talking about toilets at every conceivable opportunity. 

He mentioned toilet again?  I love toilet!

With a provocative glee worthy of Danny de Vito crossed with Fiorello LaGuardia, he relishes describing how SDI members built an informal toilet in New York City’s UN Plaza during some global confab, where it was the focus of attention from such as then Secretary general (and rent stabilization beneficiary) Kofi Annan, who like many others peeped in and asked polite questions … but declined to make a contribution.

De Vito, LaGuardia, Arputham

Using the toilet is deeply personal and terribly intimate, so to plant oneself upon the porcelain throne is an act of trust that requires the user to believe, within his or her very bowels, that the evacuation we are about to undertake will be safe and hygienic. 

We see this as funny because it contrasts invulnerable carapace with vulnerable activity

That’s why having an en-suite bathroom is such a convenience, one which when obtained during one’s life is a plateau.  Once you are used to sleeping with an en-suite bathroom, you never want to revert to that trip out of the bedroom, down the hall, or even across the back yard to the outhouse. 

Yet in cities, the diurnal population greatly outnumber the nocturnal, and the daily inflow includes many who are far from their evening’s ablution. 

And lead us not into Penn Station, but deliver us to offices …

All of us have experienced that moment of urban dread, when we have to go and see no convenience in view.  A city ought to maintain clean, safe toilets even as it maintains streets, lights, and parks – but they must be kept clean, which is no easy thing:

The toilets were a beast and an expense to maintain.

Jockin loves that blunt word ‘toilet’ – no euphemistic retreats for him to phrases like facilities, comfort station, restroom (who ever rests in there?), or that most cryptic WC for water closet.  No, a toilet it is and a toilet it shall be named.

Annoyingly, they needed a two-minute break between each user for the nozzles and sprays to do their thing. Most important, they never quite caught fire:

Block that metaphor!

The things you can find on the Web …

Toilet in Ilfracombe, Devon, destroyed by fire

Use steadily dropped from 28,000 visits the first year to fewer than half that in 2007, between the 25-cent entrance fee –

The quarter entrance charge is utterly minimal, yet that scarcely-visible curbstone was a deterrent.  While people value only what they pay for, in the developed world we have come to expect rest rooms to be free and plentiful, offered to us in bus stations, offices, hotel lobbies, restaurants – anywhere there’s a business, we expect a free rest room.  And we expect it to be clean:

A pledge since 1938 … clean rest rooms across the country

But how does one assure its cleanliness?  Public toilets are the epitome of two classic problems in economics: the free-rider problem and the tragedy-of-the-commons risk.  Port-a-potties are sometimes unavoidable, but no one’s favorite:

Man’s best friend indeed – above and beyond the call of duty

So if the toilet is free – which all us upright citizens want – how do you keep out the riffraff?  Or, in a densely urban context, do you even want to keep out the riffraff? 

You don’t want to keep me out, do you?

Wouldn’t we all rather that everybody, be he ne’er so vile, have a human right to a clean evacuation? 

The question has much more economic significance than it may seem.  Toilets must be cleaned after use.  That involves both cost and a service, a service that throughout history has been performed manually … which again brings us, in our moment of deepest personal internalization, into verbal and olfactory proximity with another human being.  Unless, that is, it can be done by a robot:

 – and what focus groups described as a profound mistrust of automation in the toilet sphere.

Sphere?  Toilets need gravity.

“It wasn’t a bad experience,” Mr. Biederman said. “It just wasn’t a great experience, and we wanted it to be great.”

The original automatic toilet: look Ma, no hands!

And so, even as the city rolled out the first of its planned 20 automated pay toilets (different manufacturer; possibly fewer problems) with equal fanfare last year, the 34th Street Partnership, leader in the post-modernization of the urban public restroom, was bravely turning back the clock.

In May 2008, the partnership quietly shut down the APT’s.

This past summer, it replaced them with bathrooms cleaned the old-fashioned way: by hand.

Low-tech is better tech?

The wisdom of the partnership’s decision has already been ratified by the public. Use has jumped more than fivefold since the toilets fully reopened in October, Mr. Biederman said.

Thus the principal barrier wasn’t price, but the assurance of cleanliness.  For that, a human being provides comfort in a way that any (current) machine cannot.

I’m not comforting?

Looking back, Mr. Biederman said in an expansive interview, the partnership could have had more faith in its ability to deliver without resorting to robots.  

Its sister organization, the Bryant Park Corporation, of which Mr. Biederman is also president, operates the flower-filled, manually maintained temples of toilethood ranked “best truly public restroom anywhere” by no less an authority than Restroomratings.com.

But the partnership did not think it would be possible to replicate the high-end Bryant experience in the much smaller Herald and Greeley facilities, and APT’s, despite their initial $500,000 price tag, seemed as if they would be cheaper to operate.

My goodness – for half a million, they better have been much cheaper. 

Between maintenance contracts, supplies and repairs, though, they ended up costing about $100,000 a year, which by 2007 was offset by only about $3,500 in user revenue. The new manual toilets, Mr. Biederman said, cost no more to maintain than the automated ones — and that’s with human attendants making as much as $12.70 an hour, though they start at $8.50

What a surprise: wetware (computing capacity that resides in biological systems known as people) beats hardware or software. 

The new bathrooms are non-automated only in the sense of who cleans them. They are, in fact, plenty space-age for most people’s purposes. Push a button and the door locks. Put a hand in front of a sensor, and a fresh length of plastic covering whips itself around the seat (LED counters tell the attendant how many servings are left). The toilet flushes automatically; the sink is sensor-operated. When finished, patrons insert their hands, perhaps with some trepidation, into a Dyson Airblade dryer, which looks like a sleek plastic pillory and calls itself “the only hand dryer that literally scrapes water from hands.”

Or better said, wetware is an essential complement to hardware and software.

But where the floors of the old restrooms had a tank-tread-like surface that automatically rotated across a scrubbing system after each use, and the toilets themselves were cleaned by a rim-mounted, U-shaped traveling brush, the new ones are inspected, mopped and scrubbed — 15 to 25 times a day — by uniformed men and women.

Community co-op toilet in Dharavi:

You do your business in private, they clean when you’re gone

“It’s an attendant who knows what’s going on and has functions that go from sanitation to exchanging a few words with you to generally having a sense of what should be done,” said Jerome Barth, the partnership’s vice president for operations.

People trust people.

“People see them, and they know the bathrooms are clean.”

There’s the developing-world lesson: for some dirty jobs, the best solution is to employ poor people.  Whether it’s ragpickers in Sao Paulo, the zabaleen of Garbage City in Cairo or the community-cooperative toilets in Mumbai, very low income people are willing to do grubby jobs … and can do them with minimal up-front cost, maximal labor flexibility, and a high standard of performance.

And if we are going to employ low-wage laborers, where will the neighborhood get the money to pay them?  A commenter to the New York Times article offered a brilliant solution:

I propose a tax on all diuretics (coffee and alcohol top the list) to help pay for public toilets. Any establishment that offers its own toilet for public use (agreeing to put a sign in the window saying so) would be eligible for the subsidy. That includes apartment and office buildings, hotels, libraries, anything. The goal should be to have at least one clearly public facility per block — and either side of the block on broad avenues.

— HK

It goes in … it must come out.  Herald Square Coffee promotion

Utterly brilliant.  There ain’t no such thing as free infrastructure, but if you distribute the increased cost among all neighborhood beneficiaries, you solve the free-rider and collective action problems.  The incremental tax would be minuscule, the aggregate benefit substantial, and the public and private establishments would be the collective beneficiaries of tourist and commuter satisfaction. 

Such a linkage was used to fund municipal infrastructure slum upgrading in Sao Paulo – water and sanitation infrastructure around the Guarapiranga reservoir funded via a surtax charged by the water company.  And it puts people to work, which generates economic activity at the pyramid’s bottom.

Good idea, Jockin!  Remind me to post about it:

David riding alongside Jockin in Mumbai’s permanent traffic jams

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“Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.”

– Noah Cross, Chinatown

“‘Course I’m respectable.  I’m old.”

Someday I’ll post in detail about Chinatown, because it (and its spiritual cousin, True Confessions) is a great film about housing development and municipal infrastructure, whose economic power did much to define Los Angeles – a city that grew where it wanted to grow.

Self-gerrymandered with self-interest in mind: Los Angeles

In a similar way, the typhoon-battered city of Manila is now proposing to grow by relocation, moving those who lived on its squalid and polluted river banks out to a new city a-building.  As reported in Bulatlat:

16 Oct 2009: Relocation Solution Poses a Dilemma to Slum Dwellers Made Homeless by Ondoy

Days after Ondoy struck, the government declared that it would no longer allow these poor Filipinos to return to their shattered homes.

Manila waterway slums before the typhoons

What is the ‘home’ to go back to?  Disaster can create an urban palimpsest, wiping away everything but the land itself.  So, as in Joe Slovo in Cape Town, we have the tension – an urgent need to do something very quickly, and a unique opportunity to do something very profound.

MANILA – In the aftermath of typhoon Ondoy, many were quick to blame the urban poor living along the creeks, waterways and riverbanks of Metro Manila. Their shanties and their garbage block these sewage systems, hence worsening the impact of the typhoon, so goes the familiar criticism.

Nonsense.  While I have not toured the now-destroyed riverbank slums, the pictures I saw at the Asia-Pacific Housing Forum, coupled with the scale of flooding, make this claim just about impossible. 

Days after the disaster, the government declared that it would no longer allow these poor Filipinos to return to their shattered homes.  Vice President Noli de Castro, who also chairs the Housing Urban Development Coordinating Council, confirmed in a news report that the families who were living along waterways and riverbanks would no longer be allowed to rebuild their homes in those areas.

Mr. de Castro’s long been interested in housing and slums

Anti-poor, or another reason?

He said government-acquired lands outside of the metropolis are more than enough to give homes to the displaced victims of Ondoy.

A good idea … if built fast enough.

De Castro offered 1,400 houses that may be utilized as relocation sites for displaced victims of Ondoy.

Sounds better …

Of these, 400 units are located in Towerville Resettlement in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan; 250 units in Southville 4 in Sta. Rosa, Laguna; 500 units in Southville 5 in Biñan, Laguna; and 250 units in Southville 5-A, also in Biñan.

Metro Manila – growing like Los Angeles

That’s the alternative offered – not a return to the insecure, filthy, disease-ridden rabbit warrens you knew, but to cleanly blocked and properly built new house.  There’s a powerful case for it.

“Our cities are so bad I sometimes wonder if we should just build completely new ones from scratch.”

– Quote from a Mexican expert at the AHI symposium

Mexico City, 28-30 October, 2009

Manila waterway slums before the typhoons

Imagine if you could de-densify the slums by expanding the city.  Can you?

He said there are 5,721 lots that may be developed to accommodate the displaced families.

Reblocking – Solly Angel’s arterial grid of dirt roads, plus security of tenure in your own plot of land – is a powerful combination.  Give people s plan and confidence in their piece of it and they will build.

“Technically, there is nothing wrong with the relocation of the families living along the areas that the government deems as danger zones,” Jon Vincent Marin, spokesman of the urban-poor group Kadamay, told Bulatlat.

A group worthy of your support

I bumped into Kadamay at Asia-Pacific.  I liked their thinking and tend to trust their perspectives.  Nor is he an unthinking doomsayer:

Marin emphasized that their organization understands the direct and immediate threat that storm surges could bring to these families.

Yet he’s a further realist:

“But if they will be relocated to areas where there is no social services and job opportunities, then there is something wrong with the relocation,” he pointed out.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Will the government follow through by creating not just a relocation camp but an actual city beyond the city?

“The government thinks that the only solution to the problem is to relocate urban-poor communities outside Metro Manila where they would not survive,” Marin said.

People move to cities in search of a better life.  Relocating them to the far countryside without income opportunities is like pulling up weeds and transplanting them to the desert; they’ll die, and your city will still have weeds.

He said these families would eventually return to the metropolis and live along the riverbanks and waterways because their condition in the relocation areas are worse than what they would be leaving behind in Metro Manila.

One cannot repatriate people into the rural poverty and expect them to stay here.  But you can bring the city to the country.  Paging Noah Cross.

Or should we?

“I’m going to bring LA to the water.”

As a participant at AHI’s recent Mexico City symposium on land irresolution commented, “People can become urbanized without moving.”

Manila waterway slums before the typhoons

Chinatown’s Noah Cross wanted the valley to become Los Angeles simply to boost the value of its land.  He had no thought of affordability except insofar as it could be achieved by building blocks and locks of houses.  “The future, Mister Gitts, the future!” 

Marin said the mere location of the resettlement areas pose problems to the families. “Most of these relocation sites are located in remote areas. They would have no source of income there. Naturally, they would want to go back to the metropolis, where at least they would have something to eat.”

He didn’t foresee that LA would grow so vast that even the valley would be built-up and dense, or that its most enduring feature would be the marvelous grid of streets, not the boxy bungalows he scattered like a human orchard.  He can be excused his lack of foresight regarding the need for social infrastructure, but the Manilans have no such excuse.

“At the right time, and in the right place, a man is capable of just about anything.”

In a recent relief operation, the Citizen’s Disaster Response Center found that most of the houses in the resettlement area in Marilao, Bulacan, had been washed away. “The houses there were made from substandard materials,” deputy executive director Carlos Padolina told Bulatlat. He said the walls were mere layers of hallow blocks and without the thick metal braces inside that would have supported these.

You must fix the houses.  You must fix the income-generation possibilities.

Should the “relocatees” choose to continue working in Metro Manila, they would have to spend so much for their fares to go home to their new homes, the transportation cost eating into the little income they have.

Manila waterway slums before the typhoon: bathing

In such a case, the families would solve their problem by geographically dividing: the earner in the city, his or her family in the country.  That’s family-destabilizing.  So is this:

Marin added that most of the relocation sites do not have access to basic services such as hospitals and schools.

City-building involves building new economies.  If you want people to come, you must build it.  Build a social infrastructure: homes, schools, jobs, shopping, safety.  Expand the city; bring it to the country.

And since the framework of the housing services of the government is profit-oriented, the resettlement units are not given free.

That’s sound policy: People value only what they pay for.

Be it ever some humble, you should pay something for it

Only this week, de Castro said that the resettlement for the victims of Ondoy will be offered at an “affordable” package of two-year moratorium on their payments, with a monthly amortization of roughly P200 at 6% per annum that is payable in 30 years.

That’s an extremely affordable monthly payment. 

But Marin said that “even if it’s just P300 to P500 a month, we have to consider the kind of jobs that they have. They have children to feed and to send to school.”

Yes, affordability is measured relative to income.  It has to be.

“For a genuine housing service for the poor,” Marin said, “a big fund is needed.” But he told Bulatlat that these projects of the government only receive 0.4 to 0.6 percent of the total budget for the expenditure of the government.

Affordable housing is expensive for government.  Money is a gating factor. 

No entry into housing without money

More money is better – but some money is much better than no money, and smart money is best of all.

 “Relocation should not only include houses. It should include social services and livelihood for the people,” Marin said.

In a statement, Kadamay reiterated that the devastation that Ondoy has brought could be the perfect opportunity for the government to change their housing projects for the poor.

Yes, if one can move quickly and wisely.  Not easy.

“We should all remember that the poor communities living along the riverbanks and waterways are only there because of too much poverty, lack of job opportunities, source of livelihood and social services,” he said. “They are not dusts that the government can sweep under the rug.” (Bulatlat.com)

If that happens, it will be as Noah Cross put it:

“‘Course I’m respectable.  I’m old.  Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

– Noah Cross, Chinatown

“And I lasted long enough”

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Manila, yesterday

Sonia Fadraigo, Federation leader and Board member of AHI’s client Slum Dwellers International wrote this morning:

Federation not OK.  Badly hit.  Biggest disaster ever.  Don’t know where to start.  Still gathering info as to how many died.  Thousands of Fed members lost their houses – washed out by the floods.  We need help.  Thank you for the concern.  Please pray for us.  Another typhoon coming.

Three weeks ago I was in Manila, at the Second Asia-Pacific Housing Forum, speaking about slum redevelopment as an urban poverty solution.  It rained the entire time, but the locals said, this isn’t rain.

I flew home.

SDI Secretariat awaits further news. National Federations on standby to go to Manila if possible and if needed.

Remember Hurricane Katrina? 

What it did to New Orleans?  How it completely changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans?

Now imagine Katrina with informal self-built slums, inadequate plumbing and sanitation, and limited municipal infrastructure.

Help the Phillippines.

More information here.

UPDATE: Among the many worthwhile disaster-response charities working in the Philippines, we particularly recommend Habitat for Humanity Asia-Pacific (HFHAP), which has a donation link on their home page: http://www.habitat.org/ap/.

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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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