How’s the rebuilding going?
Monday it was already six months since the earthquake. Still in Port-au-Prince, fewer than 5% of the condemned buildings have been demolished and cleared. Unfortunately there are some perverse incentives that help keep it that way. Most people in P-au-P rent their home. The convention for rentals here is that you pay in advance for a year or two. (Apparently is also very hard to evict someone squatting on your land, so the landowners counter by insisting on a year in advance). Even if your house is destroyed, you’ve already paid the rent and apparently the owner is under no obligation to fix the house you rented if it is destroyed. So now there are two perverse incentives. Owners don’t need to bother rebuilding because their renters have already paid anyway and if the renters get fed up and rebuild for them, they get someone to do their work for free. Renters don’t want to spend money to fix a house that isn’t theirs, and if they hold out, there is the chance that some NGO will show up and build them a new house.
To make matters worse land title is very unclear in Haiti. In some cases there are two different people with official deeds to the same land granted under different presidents. Meanwhile there are probably one or more families that actually live there.
Then there is the issue of ownership of the rubble. Rubble contains broken cement, wire, and metal which can have commercial value (at least theoretically). The rubble of a building is the property of the building owner, but rubble from a multi-unit building can also contain personal effects, appliances, and even human bodies from several different families. Often buildings in the hilly neighborhoods that were especially badly hit fall over into neighboring property. Any of these potential owners (any of the tenants, the owner of the building, and of the putative owners of the land where the rubble is sitting) can then object to removing the rubble (their property).
With this legal quagmire, you can imagine that even clearing rubble is taking forever. It looks like we will need another place to stay for people who lost their homes for a long time to come.
I promise to write more later about “temporary” housing…










