15522: Durban comments on 4 Housing Projects (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com>

I was interested to read of the May 1st inauguration of four
housing developments.  What I assume to be Village Rennaissance
(northwest of Cite Soleil) was well underway over a year ago
when my wife and I meandered over to see what was going on.  It
is built on fairly isolated land well north of over-populated
Cite Soleil, and a lot of money had been spent on it already.
The day we visited no one was working, and we assumed it to be
an unfinished leftover from the Preval years.  Glad to see that
it was finally finished, but as an old "U.N. housing advisor",
these new projects do raise some questions in my mind.

The projects which brought me to Haiti in 1979 involved the
contruction of an estimated 600 housing units in St. Martin
(Delmas 4 and Delmas 6) and another 600 in Les Drouillards --
just north of Cite Soleil.  Most of these "houses" consisted of
1 room with a porch, which was connected to an identical unit on
either side.  There were some 2 room units and a very few 3 room
units.  Material and labor costs were about $500 per room, and
each beneficiary family had to contribute some labor (CARE
provided "food for work" as the only form of payment to the
family member).  The project was conceived whereby each family
would pay approx $7 per month for 15 years on a rent/purchase
arrangement and the money would enter a revolving fund which
would be used to continue the slum clearance by building
additional new houses for residents being displaced.  There was
lots of high level Haitian criticism at the time that the houses
were too small, but U.N. logic was that with a fixed project
budget you could reach far more beneficiary families if you kept
the houses small.  Also, if you were trying to recover the costs
for the revolving fund one had to keep the monthly cost within
reach of the beneficiary families, who were mostly vacating
scrap wood and cardboard shanties and paying little or no rent.
One of the potentially big problems was determining who the
beneficiary families would be.  The projects included building
roads through the slum areas, so the procedures stipulated that
the beneficiary families had to be physically living in houses
that had to come out to make way for the new roads.  Both
projects were deemed U.N. success stories at the time.

The recently inaugurated projects are clearly geared to a
different audience.  457 new housing units with 3044 rooms
averages more than 6 rooms per housing unit!  We're told there
will be parks, a swimming pool, a kiosk, and forty stores
"primarily for government workers".  Be interesting to know
exactly how those beneficiaries are going to be chosen?  In my
housing days, Cité Soleil (then called Cité Simone) numbered an
estimated 100,000 people.  Today it must easily be double that,
with the population density probably still between 4 and 6
people per room.  I'll bet few of these folks will be moving
into the new housing.

Hey, I'm sure that there are deserving government workers, but
somehow three of these four inaugurated projects leave me with
mixed feelings.  I am reminded of Fatton's "predatory republic",
where the way to move up is to get into the government, a
government that will then look out for its own as a first
priority.

Having said that, the fourth inauguration "of units built in La
Saline, replacing homes destroyed in a 2001 fire", might be
another matter matter, and I would like to know a little more
about that project.  How many houses?  What size?  Will
beneficiaries be required to pay anything back?  The latter
question is a big one, because in any housing project if you can
get the beneficiaries to contribute something, your budgeted
funds will cover that many more beneficiaries.