“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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