“Best practices” and “exemplar communities”: Ivory tower housing solutions for Haiti
By Deepa Panchang, Other Worlds
Photo caption: Displaced Haitians march through a camp during a protest demanding better housing policy. Photo by Ben Depp, www.bendepp.com.In a 2011 Forum on the Crisis of Housing in Haiti, a group of camp residents and advocates asked “grassroots organizations and all other movements to mobilize with us on the housing issue so that we can achieve this dream of justice and liberty.” Today, with more than 500,000 people still living under sun-scorched tarps two years after the earthquake of January, 2010, the Haitian housing rights movement continues to gain urgency. Demanding comprehensive housing policy in the long term and decent, secure housing in the short term, the groups that comprise the movement have created detailed prescriptions for how to resolve the crisis. They are up against a lot, however, since most entities in charge of housing have not sought to “mobilize with” the movement; rather, they have come in with their own ideas.
The housing projects touted as the solutions to Haiti’s displacement crisis have foreign corporations and academic institutions at the helm. The story of housing serves as a revealing case study wherein foreigners with little understanding of Haitian needs are designing the kinds of communities Haitians should live in. As the first in a series of articles on disaster capitalism in Haiti, we go back to just months after the earthquake, when the private sector was explicitly put in charge of developing some of Haiti’s only formal housing plans. What transpired helps explain why so many earthquake victims remain mired in desperation to this day.


Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 10:49AM

