“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.

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The Race to Zero: How Prioritizing Closure of IDP Camps Aids and Abets Illegal and Forcible Evictions of Haitians

By Mark Snyder, International Action Ties

It has been several months since false promises were used to lure forty-three displaced families from their makeshift shelters in the camp at Barbancourt 17. The men, women and children living there had fled to the mostly vacant construction lot following the devastating January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. After facing repeated threats from the purported landowner that they would be forcibly evicted, the welcome option of an alternative place to live was proposed. Despite what you might expect, it wasn’t the man who claimed to own the land where the internally displaced persons (IDPs) were living who finally succeeded in removing them. Instead, they were deceived by the leading agency for coordination and management of Haiti’s displaced people: the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The IOM convinced the IDPs to pack their things and leave in rented buses for what turned out to be a long and disappointing trip, one that ended with them sleeping on the ground outside a police station. With these actions, the IOM side-stepped Haitian law and ignored the Guiding Principles of Internal Displacement. Is the IOM acting as the world's leading international organization for migration and "uphold[ing] the human dignity and well-being of migrants"¹ by "spreading best practices"²? Or are they complicit in forced evictions, and encouraging other humanitarian actors to be similarly complacent?

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Two Years After the Earthquake in Haiti, "Housing is Our Battle"

On the second anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, a protestor's sign reads, "If there is land for factories, there should be land for housing." Photo by Ben Depp. www.bendepp.comBy Alexis Erkert, Other Worlds
January 19, 2012

Remember, you are marching today for those who couldn’t be here,
To say to them,

“We haven’t forgotten. We’ll never forget.”
And to say to those that are still here,
We will take a stand for the rebuilding of Haiti.
                - Right to Housing Collective, January 12, 2012

On the morning of January 12, 2012, a group of women, children and men wound their way through the city wearing white, the Haitian color for mourning. Part memorial, they deposited wreaths of flowers on sites that had become mass graves during the 2010 earthquake, and part protest, they carried a banner that read “Two years later: Enough is enough.” They alternated between singing a funeral dirge and chanting, “We need houses to live in!” 

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7,500 to march on Haiti Parliament to demand housing two years on from earthquake

Marking two years since Haiti’s devastating earthquake which killed around 220,000 and left 1.5 million people homeless, 7,500 people will this Wednesday march through the centre of Port au Prince to demand access to land and adequate housing.

The Je nan Je (Eye to Eye) movement (made up of Haitian grass-roots organizations and funded by co-member ActionAid Haiti), will march to parliament on 11 January to press MPs and the government to reform land laws and enable land to be freed up to build homes for the 600,000 people still homeless.

The rebuilding of Haiti is being severely hindered by a complex set of land disputes and an acute lack of public land to rebuild.  During the quake the land registry was destroyed, deeds were lost and inheritance disputes became widespread

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Where There is No Will: Haiti’s Internally Displaced

When the landowner shouted “Why are you here?” Mr. Glover responded without hesitation: “I am here to represent these people.”During a visit to Port-au-Prince in August this year, I had a crystalline moment. I was standing between a spitting, gesturing and shouting Haitian landowner, and actor Danny Glover, surrounded by a hundred homeless Haitians in front of the gate to a construction company lot turned internal displacement camp, more than eighteen months after the earthquake. As I took stock of the situation around me, I felt it clear and bright as the Caribbean sun: there is not enough will to save these people.

We had been en route to another location, Camp Carradeux, so the delegation could see the line that had been drawn between the families “officially” relocated to the site and those that had fled there in the first days and weeks after the quake, just searching for a place safe from the collapsing that continued to go on around them in the city. 

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