The proposed new town development on lands at Inverness in Clarendon, one of several millennium projects to complement Highway 2000, will not materialise as originally outlined by developers, the National Housing Trust (NHT).

“It was not desirable for a new town, which was primarily residential in nature, to be put in the designated area,” said Joy E Douglas, the senior urban and regional planner in charge of the Highway 2000 Corridor Development Plan in the Office of the Prime Minister.

“We have to reserve it for industrial development because it is the only area in the country which has the four transportation modes accessible,” said Douglas. “It is the only area with rail, road, port and the airport at Vernamfield. There is nowhere else on this island where all of those transportation variables converge, so the country cannot mess around with how it goes about developing this area because it has too much potential.”

According to the plan on the NHT drawing board, the new town would cover 4,400 hectares of land, offer the market 24,880 residences inclusive of 17,000 mixed housing solutions; 3,000 townhouses; 4,880 apartments; 32 elementary schools, eight high schools; a hospital and a stadium and accommodate over 150,000 people over 20 years.

But Douglas told the Sunday Observer that the decision not to go ahead as proposed was based on the outcome of work conducted under the plan. For example, Inverness is in the vicinity of industrial entities such as the Jamaica Aluminum Company (Jamalco), the Moneymusk Sugar factories and the Vernamfield airstrip, an area recognised as a “major growth point in terms of industrial development”.

“They are incompatible land uses. So the rule of thumb is that we do not, as planners, site residential land use close to industrial land use,” Douglas pointed out, emphasising that the area had three existing industrial uses of which the alumina plant and extractive industries were a part, in addition to being a declared mineral deposit area.

“This entire area has been designated for mineral development by the Mines and Geology Division many years ago, even before the Portland Bight area was created, and so the regulations permit mining within the protected area because of that prior commitment…” she added.

Douglas described the decision as “a planning move” to maximise what the country had, given the fact that the prospects for bauxite would diminish in another half century and the sugar industry was waning.

“If the highest and best use is of a significant economic value, which, in this case, would be the industrial mineral development, then that in fact has to supercede any other use,” she told the Sunday Observer in an interview.

Furthermore, she pointed out that since the neighbouring Vernamfield area had been zoned for international cargo, based on international planning standards, it was imperative that certain land uses were not “developed around airports as that affects the viability of the facility”.

She said a draft zoning ordinance was now being considered by the Town and Country Planning Authority within the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) for ratification.

But Douglas made it clear that this was by no means the end of the Inverness housing plan. Instead, “the houses will be built throughout the planning area within the existing human settlement through either a development programme…or a redevelopment programme, particularly where there was squatting”, she explained.

She maintained that the NHT would still have a part to play in the reconfigured plan. “The NHT is going nowhere. It’s just that we are planning now,” Douglas said.

“We are not really losing the thousands of houses that were going to be built; they are just not going to be built where somebody thought, or had an idea of where they would be built,” she remarked, citing Spanish Town or May Pen as possible alternatives with much vacant land.

Both Spanish Town and May Pen had been earmarked for aggressive redevelopment, as each had about a third of their housing stock being squatter housing, she disclosed.

The NHT would be playing a central role in the Spanish Town Redevelopment Company (SPARCOM ) with primary responsibility for dealing with the housing issues there.

“The people of Spanish Town have been very aggressive in pushing the agenda. They want Spanish Town redeveloped like yesterday. That level of urgency has not come from Clarendon,” Douglas added.

Asked where the NHT got the idea that the new town development could work in the first place, the urban and regional planner conceded it was due to “a general planning problem in Jamaica”.

The root cause of this deficiency was a lack of proper planning for land use and the fact that the majority of the development orders guiding land use and designation were antiquated, going as far back as the 1930s.

“I think that in order to understand how the NHT and any other entity might find itself in a pickle you really need to look at the legislation and the regulations that govern planning in this country and why it is really quite a mess,” she said. “It is too vague. The point is because we are not planning, so we are not zoning our land use appropriately and even entities like the NHT fall into that trap,” Douglas suggested.

She said the “ambiguity in the legislation was the cause of the confusion, both in terms of allowing people to know what it is they can and cannot do on land for which they have a development right and for the institutions that have responsibilities in these areas”. As such, the issue “was not an NHT problem but a planning problem”.

“The point is, the NHT is not a planning authority, it is a housing trust,” she said. “So the NHT, like any other entity or investor should, in fact, be in a position to readily access information that allows it to make informed decisions about how it carries out its mandate.”

She said while it might appear that planning was costly, it was the “most cost-effective thing a society could do” in the long run. According to Douglas the “political directorate will have to accept the responsibility that they need to allocate the requisite resources to get what needs to be done, to bring the country under a planning regime”.