Our crumbling mansion

A relative passed away some years ago and left you a generous inheritance. You were a young adult, recently married, and ready to start a great new life with your spouse. You were ambitious and decided to use most of the money to build a large house for your new family. Your regular, stable source of income was, and still is, a modest salaried job in the public service.

Every time you got back pay, you decided to add more, instead of dealing with the numerous, small problems that arose regularly. You ignored that leak in the roof over bedroom number four, and placed a bucket to collect the water. That month, you added a pool; in another year an outdoor patio; and for your final splurge, a new extension that you could use as an entertainment room (paid for with a loan).

Times have grown increasingly hard. Wage increases have been meagre, and your large house has increasingly been a drain of your finances. The new entertainment room looks great, but the original kitchen is in disrepair.

Today, things have got so bad that the exterior of your house is in need of a new paint job. You can, however, only afford one gallon of paint.

What do you decide to do: try to get the most out of that one gallon and concentrate on the areas that are most visible and give you the greatest bang for the buck, or spread the one gallon thinly over the entire house and leave it with a slightly improved, but woefully inadequate-looking paint job?

Your sister, who also inherited the same amount of money and worked in a similar job, decided to do things a little differently. She, also newly married, decided to start small. She invested in a modest apartment that was easier to maintain, and took care of the minor upkeep expenses that arose over the years. She was able gradually to improve the apartment with stainless-steel appliances, LED televisions in the two bedrooms and living room, hardwood floors, quartz countertops in the kitchen and two bathrooms, and eventually, even a jacuzzi on her tiny back patio.

Your stove, however, was rusting, and running on one working burner. The ceramic tiles on your countertops and floors were cracked, and your pool water had now turned green and unsanitary because you could not afford the chlorine to keep it clean.

You spread yourself too thin. Perhaps you could have had hardwood floors too, but you had four times the amount of floor space to cover. Your kitchen was three times as large, so quartz countertops would have cost a lot more. Instead of taking care of what you already had, you kept adding on to your already unsustainable maintenance bill.

This certainly was not a wise way to invest your limited resources to develop your property. Now, your dilemma with the one bucket of paint has left you pondering your decisions and future options.

Your moment of reflection has possibly been more contemplative than that of our decision-makers of the past and present – but hopefully not the future – who have, and continue to, promote the notion of population decentralisation all over this tiny nation.

Do not let the smoothly paved roads in the new suburban communities fool you. In a decade, they too will likely succumb to the same neglect as the communities built a decade earlier, and the best roads will then be in the even newer communities, even farther from the job centres.

As a nation we had, and still have, a choice. We can choose to limit the number of new communities that we create on undeveloped, virgin land, and make better use of the existing cities, towns, and communities. We could be converting older single-family homes to duplexes and triplexes, or demolishing them and constructing apartment buildings, in order to increase the housing supply, while maximising the use of the existing infrastructure.

Instead, without having the resources to maintain the roads, bridges, water and sewer pipes and power lines that already exist – because we have already spread our population and settlements unnecessarily wide over the islands – we predominantly continue to increase our maintenance liabilities by building infrastructure to service new communities increasingly far from existing urban centres.

The economic activity and tax revenues generated by these new developments typically cannot cover the costs of providing good infrastructure and reliable police, fire, ambulance, and other vital services. Emergency services are spread increasingly thin. They have much wider areas and longer distances to cover, and their response times suffer as a result.

Most would condemn you for using your money so recklessly. Do they condemn our post-Independence decision-making for continuing to use our limited resources in an eerily similar way?

Ryan Darmanie is a professional urban planning and design consultant, and an avid observer of people, their habitat, and the resulting socio-economic and political dynamics. You can connect with him at darmanieplanningdesign.com or email him at ryan@darmanieplanningdesign.com