Transitional housing in Haiti getting built slowly

PAPETTE, Haiti — Unlike the vast majority of earthquake victims still crowded into squalid camps, the simple farmers of this hard-hit village have reason to hope as hurricane season looms.

Transitional housing now rises on the foundations of cinderblock homes pulverized by the Jan. 12 quake, framed in pressure-treated yellow pine, roofed in rustproof paint-coated galvanized steel and anchored in newly poured concrete.

The Dutch relief group, Cordaid, expects to finish 150 of the dwellings with sturdy tarpaulin walls by next week in this village overlooking a mango-lined lagoon. They are among the first of more than 130,000 semi-permanent shelters that international relief groups hope to put up in the earthquake zone in coming months.

But construction of the shelters — more than a tent but less than a house — has been excruciatingly slow, with barely 400 or so completed.

Two major factors impede the rollout: the crawling pace of rubble removal in Port-au-Prince, where a third of the city is still buried in quake debris, and Haiti's vexing land issues.

Relief agencies can't build shelters in the jammed tent camps that sprung up after the quake on every available inch of public land in Port-au-Prince, as well as on the private property of schools and businesses.

Nor can they build on most plots where the homeless previously resided because about 80 percent of them were renters, and the agencies fear the intended recipients would only be evicted by landowners.

Papette farmer Andre Senvoy, 57, the rare Haitian who holds title to the tract where he has been living, grins as apprentice carpenters hammer together his new shelter next to the makeshift corrugated steel shelter he fashioned from the remains of his quake-shattered home.

"The people in Port-au-Prince need to pray more so they can also get lucky," Senvoy remarks, a straw hat shading his gray-stubbled face from a blistering midday sun.

Because of land ownership issues, only a few dozen transitional homes have gone up in the capital, where more than half of the 1.3 million homeless still live in tents and flimsy structures fashioned mostly of tarps and bed sheets.

For now, the place where the most transitional shelters are slated to go up is a dusty relocation camp 45 minutes north of the capital at Corail Cesselesse on land that Haiti's government appropriated March 19.

Relief organizations don't like relegating the displaced to relocation camps far removed from friends, families and jobs. But agencies have scoured the capital and its suburbs for available land with paltry results.