Holness urges major downtown Kingston renewal plan

Prime Minister Andrew Holness says downtown Kingston has declined sharply since his youth, telling business leaders that the capital’s main commercial district now needs a wide-ranging programme to tackle sewage, roads and deteriorating buildings.

Holness made the comments on Thursday night while addressing the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce 41st Annual Awards Banquet. He referred to his own experience after leaving St Catherine High School, when he attended a graduation ball at a hotel in downtown Kingston and, he said, the community felt secure enough for students to rest on the grass before catching buses home the next morning.

"But it hasn't changed in over 40 years. In fact, it looks worse," said Holness, 53.

The prime minister said current clean-up activities in the area should be recognised, but argued that they fall well short of what is required.

"While I applaud the attempt, it is merely a patch. There is so much more to do for downtown Kingston," he said. "The infrastructure there is in need of significant intervention - from the sewage to the roads to the sick buildings. It needs a massive plan."

His remarks follow a recent Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation initiative aimed at cleaning city streets while improving order and security.

Holness linked the condition of downtown Kingston to years of what he called "considerable disinvestment in the infrastructure of our capitals". He said money was no longer the only obstacle to major change.

"It is not now only a matter of how it will be financed. The question is, do we have the administrative and organisational capability to do it with speed?" he said.

According to Holness, the same limitations in public-sector capacity that affect the renewal of downtown Kingston helped drive the creation of the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority. NaRRA is a government agency intended to deliver reconstruction spending at the pace and scale needed because the existing bureaucracy "simply could not take on the transformation that will be required in the recovery from Hurricane Melissa."

"The current bureaucracy has never spent six billion US dollars in any capital programme," he said. "Think about it."

Downtown Kingston sits on Jamaica’s south-eastern coast and is the capital’s principal cultural and business centre. The district includes part of the world’s seventh-largest natural harbour and is home to major banks, retail and wholesale businesses, and outdoor markets such as Coronation Market, widely known as Curry.

Several important public institutions are also located there, including Parliament, the Supreme Court, Kingston Public Hospital, which serves as a major trauma facility in the region, and the Institute of Jamaica.

The area also contains a number of inner-city communities where housing is old and, in some cases, badly run down. Research and policy discussions have associated the long-running social and economic difficulties in those communities with continuing crime and violence in sections of the urban centre.