Tara Abrahams-Clivio

It is easy to romanticise about life in the inner city. Poverty that no one could deserve, a lack of opportunity that cripples even the most ambitious, and a social order that comes with the price of freedom or even ultimately your life - this is the inner city. A leader who protects the meek from everyone but himself, a leader who is feared and respected as a necessary evil, until his profits take him uptown to live "legit" and grace the social pages, leaving behind another bloody cycle. Surely this kind of suffering must be addressed, and those who have grown to know and love the residents of the inner city are passionate about this, but passion is not always courage, and it will take immense courage to solve the problems of the inner city, not money, and not politically correct rhetoric.

As I drove past the "board villas" and looked in - small, dark orifices where a man sat by a pot on the floor, a child played on the dirt floor, this is home for many. The streets were filled with people moving in no one direction, seemingly without real purpose. My guide advised that when people have comfortable homes, they don't linger on the street. There were toddlers walking about unattended, one stopped by a hose poking through a zinc fence, water ran freely from it and the baby playfully ran her container under it. It struck me as odd that the water was just left on.

Later a resident would explain that they had to remove all the taps from their pipes because people would come by and just leave them on. She explained that when you don't pay for the water you don't worry about conserving it. I asked innocently about the NWC and I was met with raised eyebrows: "And who is going to come in here and collect?" Similarly, the skies were webbed with wires making illegal power connections to the homes, potential death traps for these same children left to fend for themselves for hours.

The police were nowhere to be seen, but on every corner a patrol of young men who seemed only to just tolerate us. Our path was controlled not by the laws of the land but by the only available route left, as most roads had been blocked by residents to prevent drive-by shooting. Here only three minutes from Spanish Town Road I too was under the control of another order. Two army vehicles passed, but law and order was not their concern; they are fighting a war that is bigger than that.

I was on a tour of the National Housing Trust projects that represent a new hope for the inner city by providing so many people with comfortable accommodation, and clearly a much-needed sense of dignity. I was assured that members of the strata plan committees had been trained and that these projects would not go the way of the many lower-income inner-city developments before them, reduced into dilapidated dens of illegality. The new electrical meters shone in the sun with all the hope of future readings. Yet already the playground swings had been looted and the frame stood alone, useless without its seats. The residents were well on their way to being homeowners and with that they will have some independence, the kind of independence that could break the vicious dependency they have on an illegal system. One block of the new NHT developments has been named "shot blocker" because of the barrier it creates between Rema and Denham Town. Only time will tell if this name can move from a literal interpretation to a figurative one.

Yet I am not convinced that this group of homeowners can stand up to the temptations of the wider community for long.
Why pay for utilities when everyone else for miles around does not? Why continue to pay the NHT mortgages when "Who is going to come in here to collect them?" The success of these projects must be part of an entire community effort that will bring back legality and freedom to all the residents.
The NHT cannot do this alone, they must work closely with the law and statutory bodies which can continue the work long after handing over the keys. The success of this project is critical because there are thousands of long-standing contributors who are struggling to pay rent and make ends meet. For this project to fail would be a crime against the residents of the inner city and also against all taxpayers, wherever they live.

The inner city is like a magnifying glass, highlighting many of our society's ills, uptown as well as downtown. Perhaps uptown is less blatant, but let these garrison communities be a very real example of what will happen when lawlessness takes over.

TaraClivio@cwjamaica.com

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