15664: JHudicourt: culturally appropriate housing (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JHUDICOURTB@aol.com

I would like to make a suggestion to the Haitian government for its future
housing projects.    Before I do that I would like to say that in the US
mistakes were made in the way public housing was developed and there has been sort of
a reform in the way things are done.   Large buildings like the famous
Cabrini Green in Chicago had to be destroyed because the idea of just providing
shelter without consideration of making places liveable socially eventually can
create hell on earth.
So to get to Haiti now.   We do have a strong sense of family and our
cultural values demand that we live in a lakou.   We are not always able to reproduce
these lakou but we constantly try.   All of my life in Haiti I have always
have relatives as neighbors.  Even in the US cities, Haitians buy small
apartment buildings and populate them with relatives.   So I would suggest that in the
future, homes be built in small groups, and sold in small groups.   That way
families and relatives can pool their resources and help each other with
child-rearing, financial security, and the pletora of other issues faced by
families like water and energy.   In addition to lakou type   housing arrangement,
micro-credit companies seem to have found that financing small groups of women
heads of household in Haiti is one of the safest credit transaction an
institution can make (see Fonkoze for reference).