A DAY IN HAITI

There’s a big scramble to build shelter to protect Haiti’s earthquake victims from impending rains, but it is likely that tents and lean-tos will become permanent slum housing.

BY FRANCES ROBLES AND ANDRES VIGLUCCI   frobles@MiamiHerald.com

Like Charles, the vast majority of Haitians living in tent cities that arose in the days following the quake are in desperate need of shelter. Most sleep under sheets strung from trees. The lucky ones used nails and sticks, and more and more are finding scraps of wood and tin to build with.

But the government wants them to stop.

“We are asking people not to do that,” said Haiti’s minister of communications, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue. “The problem is, we are waiting for better tents.”

The government and the United Nations have plans to move people out of the spontaneous, post-quake settlements into planned temporary camps just outside the city.

The government now needs to clear out the improvised camps inside the city and begin demolishing buildings to make room for planned, organized and well-built neighborhoods, said Charles Clemont, special advisor to President Rene Préval.

`GO FAST’

 “I am asking my colleague in charge of demolition to go fast, but to go fast in an orderly fashion. We need to move these people within the city, not far,” Clemont said. “We need to start demolition now.”

But experts say that with so many homeless people on the streets and rain coming soon, there is no good alternative to improvised dwellings. Even as thousands of tents arrive from agencies around the world, recovery experts say those have a short life span, and there may be not be enough to shelter all those who need it.

The U.N., which has distributed 7,000 tents, says they’re only a last resort — a quick, short-term solution for a nation that faces rains starting later this month, and beyond that the summer hurricane season.

“The shelf life of a tent is six months to one year, when the reconstruction of Port-au-Prince will take five, seven or 10 years,” said Mark Turner, spokesman for the International Office of Migration, the U.N. agency that is coordinating shelter issues. “No one wants to live in a tent for a very long time.”

Turner said the agency’s push now is to provide better materials, like rope, tarp and corrugated iron, to build “transitional” housing, which can be improved over time and even disassembled.

“Ten years from now, are there going to be towns in the parks where these camps are now? Possibly,” Turner said. “What are the options? Are you going to raze the whole city? You have to help the people where they are, and this is where they are.”

The shacks people are building, he said, have several benefits: Residents can stand in them, conduct business in them, and survive a hurricane in them.

And tents, some Haitians say, will not keep out the driving rain.

`BIG SHOWER’

“When it starts to rain, everyone here will have a big shower,” said Marie Yvelen Boisdefer, who helps run the tent city at Sylvio Cator Stadium. “Showers with no soap.”

If the history of disaster recovery across the world is any guide, experts say, the government won’t be able to stand in the way of improvised rebuilding.

New shantytowns will likely arise, making the government’s dreams of a better Port-au-Prince difficult to achieve, said Lawrence Vale, professor of urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-editor of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster. The Haitian government has talked about reducing the city’s size by resettling people outside Port-au-Prince, then building better in urban areas. But though mass disasters like the Haiti quake often generate ambitious schemes for remaking cities, the reality is they almost never pan out, Vale said.

“People are going to build informally just as they were building before the earthquake,” Vale said. “A lot of people, especially those with remittances coming in from relatives abroad, will be able to use their resources to rebuild locally even if the larger picture remains substantially devastated.”

In storm-prone countries like El Salvador, entire neighborhoods are named after the date of the hurricane that forced the residents to set up there with donated materials. In Haiti’s capital, some slums swelled with squatters who fled flooding in Gonaïves in 2008.

Some experts also warn the Haitian government must be careful that the new refugee camps it establishes outside the city don’t also become permanent settlements.

“You do not want what are commonly referred to as refugee camps, hundreds of thousands of tents, you don’t want them to become permanent,” said David Meltzer, senior vice president of international services for the American Red Cross. architect and planner Andrés Duany said residents should be provided boards and corrugated steel.

“No one ever moves off their community sites after a disaster — ever in history,” said Duany, who just returned from Port-au-Prince, where he met with Preval. “They just don’t.”

Miami Herald staff writers Lesley Clark, Kathleen McGrory and Jim Wyss contributed to this report.

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