PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—At the top of the hill where an old colonial fort overlooks the immaculate grounds of a razed presidential palace, newly built sidewalks and widened alleys lead into new residential communities being shaped by tree-lined courtyards, indoor plumbing and towering condominium-style apartments.
Below, bulldozers move listlessly from one partially built concrete structure to another along a once battered Rue Estime, as construction workers beat back scorching heat and hammer as fast as they can. “Imagine if all of the houses were like this,” Ulrick Gilles, a 40 year-old unemployed husband and father, said from the confines of his newly constructed, government-subsidized, second-floor apartment in one of this capital’s most quake-ravaged neighborhoods. “Even if you couldn’t call it a paradise, it would still allow people to live better lives.”
A haphazardly built and volatile slum that foreign donors and international aid groups once shunned, Fort National is getting a long-overdue makeover courtesy of a little-used coproperty law that finally allows Haitians like Gilles, who lost his house in the cataclysmic January 12, 2010, earthquake, to be homeowners again.
Disaster zone
THOUGH the law initially came into existence in 1974 and was strengthened in 2009, it wasn’t until former President Michel Martelly issued more protections in a 2011 executive order that the government and international community dared use it.
“You’re slowly seeing the transformation of a neighborhood,” said Claude-Andre Nadon, senior program manager with the United Nations Office for Project Services (Unops), which has built 600 new housing units and repaired more than 1,200 in eight neighborhoods since the earthquake left 1.5 million homeless. “This place was a disaster zone.”
Fort National’s transformation comes as 61,302 Haitians continue to live underneath squalid tents, and as Haiti and foreign donors continue to face enormous challenges in providing permanent housing amid dwindling aid dollars and a deepening political crisis.
Completely changed
THE country’s failure to replace the 100,000 houses leveled by the quake by all accounts has been the biggest failure of the reconstruction response. Haiti and US-financed housing projects have been slammed for shoddy construction and unaccountable contractors, while both governments also have come under fire for failing to follow through on housing goals.
But if there’s anything close to a model of the lessons learned over the years, it is Fort National. The construction of almost 300 single and condo-style units, installation of streetlights and the rehabilitation of water kiosks and streets may seem small. But supporters note that it’s changing the façade of an informal settlement, and providing employment and training to locals in proper and anti-seismic construction techniques.
“I am not just hiring five guys; I am hiring everyone from the neighborhood,” Nadon said. “So when that guys asks for an extension [on his single unit] he’s going to ask the foreman and that foreman now knows how to do it properly. Their way of building has completely changed.”
Clement Belizaire, executive director of Haiti’s Housing and Public Buildings Construction Unit, said: “The housing is very nice; well-built. The engineering? A-plus. But the real success of Fort National and everything that has had to do with housing is the change of mentality.”
Decent home
NADON and his team first visited National in 2011.
They spent three years negotiating with gang leaders and community residents to launch the project, and then with skeptical residents to give up their plots and shacks—sometimes barely larger than a bedroom—in exchange for decent corridors, public spaces and a 376-square-foot apartment.
“In lot of cases people didn’t want to move,” he said. “All would say, ‘Haitians don’t like living on the second floor; they don’t want to live together.’”
Eventually, many would agree. Some would even donate as much as 80 percent of their land back to the community in order to allow the chaotic landscape of vacant plots and sweltering tin and tarp-covered shacks to be transformed.
“Haitians are no different from a guy in Miami or Canada. They want to live in a decent home,” Nadon said. “[Eventually] they understood that in order to have something like this, you need space. You need space to put septic tanks, you need space to have water pipes coming in, you need space to have the trees. After a while they get it.”
Rural mode
BELIZAIRE, the housing czar, said the coproperty law makes a lot of sense in a densely populated Haiti, but “the social mobilization to get people to think rationally and not selfishly” is quite a challenge.
“We’re living in the city and we want to live in rural mode,” he said. “Everybody wants to have their own yard; everybody wants to have their own house; nobody wants to share walls with neighbors. When you share a wall, you cut the costs. We have to start thinking multlevel housing.”
The concept first surfaced months after the quake when then-President Rene Preval vowed to rebuild Fort National. Preval dispatched government bulldozers to remove rubble. He also asked international aid organizations to redirect cash-for-work dollars to the slum, and he tapped the head of his state construction agency—and eventual presidential pick—Jude Celestin to build 2-by-3-feet wide units for 6,000 displaced families. Celestin, an engineer who is once more seeking the presidency, proposed constructing multistory apartments instead. Some $174 million was approved for Fort National’s reconstruction by the parliament as part of the budget, and the no-bid contract was given to a firm owned by powerful Dominican Sen. Felix Bautista.
Miami Herald/TNS