Six months after the disaster, huge numbers of Haitians are still living under tarpaulins in camps, many of them at risk of flooding in the coming rainy season. Most of their residents have nowhere else to go, both due to the scarcity of remaining housing and the lack of ability to pay rent. The camps are obviously not a long-term solution.
There are a large number of humanitarian organizations, including the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, working on providing transitional shelter in Haiti. Funding for their work from the international community has been swift and generous. Yet, progress remains slow, as the agencies do not know where to build.
“Renting is the norm in Haiti” notes Graham Saunders, Head of the IFRC Shelter & Settlements Department. Very few people own title to their own plots and homes. At the same time, space is at a high premium. “The biggest challenge for Shelter Cluster members is the acute lack of suitable land on which to build transitional shelters” notes Saunders. Haiti is indeed a very dense country. With a territory half the size of the Dominican Republic, its population nevertheless equals that of its neighbouring country. “There is not even enough space to put up tents.”
“What is needed is temporary sites that would last for about 1 to 10 years.” However they are impossible to organise on a significant scale as long as land ownership is contested and no market is well established. “Agencies cannot start building transitional shelters until land agreements are concluded.”
The UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes was recently quoted expressing a similar frustration: "I think there's not a shortage of materials or of capacity to build these shelters, it's a question of (the government) saying right this is where we're going to build, this is how many people we're going to put there, now let's do it."
These kinds of property law issues frequently arise in post-disaster situations. As in Haiti, land registry systems are incomplete in many countries. Documents relating to land titles as well as physical landmarks denoting property divisions are often themselves destroyed. While many governments have the power to impound land for public use, doing so has enormous financial implications for landowners and is therefore inevitably highly political.
This is not the last time we are going to face this kind of problem,” noted Saunders. “There is a real need both for governments and humanitarian organizations to become much more sophisticated about these legal problems and to make themselves ready for them in advance.”