NYC architects produce housing for homeless

NEW YORK — A team of New York architects is flying to Haiti this week with prototypes of an octagonal vinyl structure they hope will help house some of the 1.5 million Haitians still homeless because of the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The first of the aluminum-and-steel octagonal structures will be built in Jacmel in southern Haiti under an arrangement with the nonprofit group Rural Haiti Project. Each has 166 square feet of space and is designed to withstand wind, hurricanes and earthquakes.

Haiti’s housing shortage is acute, with homeless camps growing instead of shrinking as even more people leave standing homes in search of aid or are unable to pay rent. Others are afraid to return to the thousands of homes rated safe to enter, unsure of whether another quake will come.

The HaitiSOFTHOUSE can be clustered for extended families or for use as a school or clinic. The units can be assembled in one day and, weighing about 400 pounds, can be picked up and moved by hand. They are designed to last up to five years.

Architect Lonn Combs said the octagonal shape is “inherently more rigid against lateral forces” than a square.

Combs said there is no one single solution to Haiti’s housing crisis.

“What makes us unique is that we have access to a site in Jacmel right now,” he said. “We will be able to provide 20 units next month in a kind of field test.”

The United Nations’ envoy to the Haitian reconstruction committee, Edmond Mulet, told the group at its meeting Wednesday that Haiti’s struggling democracy is in jeopardy if earthquake survivors’ lives are not improved.

“The longer that the victims continue living in precarious conditions, the more they will have reason to be discontent,” Mulet said at the meeting in the Dominican resort of Punta Cana. “That discontent can be manipulated for political ends.”

The problem, aid workers told Mulet, is finding landowners willing to turn over property. Those could easily become new shantytowns, with no plans for new tenants to pay rent or become property owners themselves.