Shelters designed for Haiti

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 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.

“There are people who are in these vulnerable conditions every day that can’t live in those situations very long without getting sick,” said architect Rodney Leon, project manager for the octagonal shelter. “So we wanted to find something that was somewhere between a tent and a permanent house.”

Deutsche Bank provided a $50,000 challenge grant for the project, called HaitiSOFTHOUSE, and organizers have raised most of the other $50,000, said Gary Hattem, president of the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation. The structures can be mass produced for less than $3,000 each.

One of the structures designed by Leon – who also designed the African Burial Ground National Monument – went on display Thursday at the bank’s U.S. headquarters on Wall Street.

“This is so far superior to the tent communities that people are in,” Hattem said.

Each SOFTHOUSE 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.

There has been no shortage of ideas for transitional shelter – which many experts believe will become permanent anyway. For months, entrepreneurs have visited officials, selling projects for house-building factories, experimental structures and prefabricated huts.

Meanwhile, navigating Haiti’s byzantine, corruption-addled customs system has been difficult. Builders have complained of delays at ports and at the border, holding up construction.

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.”