MAJESTY Gardens, the gritty South West St Andrew community, a segment of which is famously known as ‘Back To’ is to be renamed as part of efforts to improve its status, its Member of Parliament Dr Angela Brown Burke has declared.

The community, bordered by Spanish Town Road to the north and Marcus Garvey Drive to the east, is regarded as one of the most socially deprived neighbourhoods in the Corporate Area and is perhaps most known as the seat held by former Prime Minister of Jamaica, Portia Simpson Miller from 1989 before she vacated it in 2017.

Speaking at the handing-over ceremony for 32 duplex housing units in the area on Wednesday, Brown-Burke, who has held the seat since 2017, said while there is significance in the current name of the community, change was imminent.

“Pretty soon after today, this scheme will no longer be referred to as Majesty Gardens Phase 1; that is a construction term. When you live in a community, it has a name that the community embraces, so we are looking forward to that, don’t it?”, she asked residents who replied “yes” in concert.

In commending the National Housing Trust for its willingness to listen to the voices of residents, Brown-Burke said, “They have been on the ground working with the community and we have said to them, whereas some of the other schemes have some addresses that when you put that down on paper people know that you come from somewhere down below Cross Roads, the block this, room this…we have said we don’t want our addresses to look like that.”

“I am going to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that they have determined that your addresses won’t look like that. It will be a number, a street, a road or whatever and then the Kingston 13,” the Member of Parliament said to applause.

She, in the meantime, also made a pitch for the Three Miles Square, which was renamed in honour of her predecessor to be given the accord it deserves.

“The next thing is Three Miles, St Andrew. The square is known as the Portia Simpson Miller Square. We want to make sure we come back to recognise the woman herself, the queen as we call her, and mother of all of us because that square has special significance, and we want to make sure it is associated with her for the tremendous work she has done in the area,” Brown-Burke said to further applause.

“Portia Simpson Miller throughout her career took a lot of licks for the constituency, a whole heapa licks. People spoke about what had not been done and what she was not able to achieve but they would not understand the effort and magnitude of work she has done to bring this place from where she found it, significant transformation,” the MP declared.

In the meantime, Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who was the keynote speaker at the handing-over ceremony, agreed with the proposal by Brown-Burke.

“I don’t know what the new name of the community will be, but whatever it is, of your choosing, of course you will have my full endorsement,” Holness said.

The prime minister went on to express bewilderment over the absence of a “standardised system of addresses”.

“We do have a framework, but it is not often followed. Excellent members of parliament such as Dr Brown Burke, she understands when she has to go through the voters’ list to find people and all you can see is a road name or a community name and where are these people? Where do they live?” he noted.

Said Holness: “It is quite unfortunate, but this is another challenge that we face as a society, that we don’t properly document our citizens and a part of documenting our citizens is not just establishing name, gender, religion and where you went to school and telephone number, [but] it is also establishing your address, where you live. Because it is unfortunate that vagrancy is still a concept in our modern society; it shouldn’t be, every single person should have an address, should be attached to a physical place that you can be found.”

One of the youngest mortgagors to receive a key on Wednesday, who gave his name only as Derval, expressed a sense of fulfilment with the achievement, but was miffed at what he says is the negative attention trained on the community, and the questions of individuals as to how he came to be a homeowner given that he also wiped windscreens as an income earner.

“My concern is that some people will put bad things in the [media] because they don’t rate a lot of people from Majesty Gardens, point blank — they downgrade Majesty Gardens. You are telling them that good people come from Majesty Gardens, you have good and bad here. I have been living here for 31 years and I can tell you that,” he told the Jamaica Observer. He further pointed out that he had been employed to several prominent companies since leaving high school and had been an NHT contributor during those times.

“I could choose anything else. I could have stolen, I could have robbed but I chose not to because I see a lot of youth my age go down just like that, so why don’t people say yes youth mi love dat? I could have done anything else but I chose not to, even an incident where they killed my brother… I could have picked up the gun but I chose not to,” he said.

The handing over of the units which comprise 24 studio apartments, four one-bedroom units and two one-storey, three-bedroom units marked the completion of Phase 1 of the Majesty Gardens Housing Development, under which 48 housing solutions were completed and handed over in 2013. Of the 32 handed over on Wednesday, three were allocated to the New Social Housing Programme which caters to Jamaicans who are not earning enough to become National Housing Trust mortgagors. The cost of the units have been subsidised by the trust with the studios going for $4.8 million, the one-bedroom dwellings at $6 million and the two-bedroom one-storey units for $8.9 million.