With the looming rainy season and housing proposals coming to disaster-prone Haiti, both government officials and relief workers are in a race against nature to relocate hundreds of thousands of quake victims living in squalid camps prone to flooding. But in their fervent pursuit of rain-resistant shelter, they are finding an old problem quickly becoming a new one: lack of suitable land.
Even before Haiti’s biggest disaster leveled more than 200,000 homes and buildings, land was already a problem in this densely populated nation where the Champs de Mars camp now boasts one person per 53 square feet, instead of the international norm of one person per 484 square feet.
Illegal squatters living on private and government land, often in substandard conditions with nothing more than dirt for a floor, are as much a norm as people spending their life savings in corruption-ridden legal battles over land title.
via For many in Haiti, there’s nowhere to call home – Haiti – MiamiHerald.com.