Dec 10, 2010
Our organization, which has built six permanent houses to date thanks to the increased financial assistance given after the earthquake by our support community in the United States and Haiti, cannot build a house in Haiti for a family of five for $3,000. A recent TIME article (12/13/2010) reports that there is at least one organization that says it can. The organization is offering to build a house in Haiti in the name of a donor’s friend or family member as an alternative Christmas gift.
Based on my experience, it is more likely to cost $8,000 to $10,000 to build a modest house for a family of five in Haiti. This price includes the cost for land but not indoor plumbing or electric, which most people do not have. Maybe my estimate is higher because we are only a private, free boarding school and not a large international NGO. Then again, maybe it is because it is not actually possible to build a house for $3,000 when all costs are considered.
First, I want to be clear. I am not writing this to discourage individual charitable or governmental support to Haiti—the country needs both. My concern is simply that attractive but unrealizable promises, when they are not fulfilled, will discourage future funding for Haiti. Also, the under pricing of housing makes it harder to find funding for those who are reporting the full costs to find funding.
I am also prompted to write this by the promise just after the earthquake by several large international non-governmental organizations to build 134,000 shelters for those Haitians displaced by the disaster. Now, eleven months after the earthquake, roughly only 20,000 have been completed while more than 90% are funded. Who benefited the most from this promise? Gives one pause, n’est ce pas?
Here is the math from what I know about post-earthquake house building in Haiti. Land in our area before the earthquake was $10 per square meter. Today, it is likely to run $15 to $20. This would be for very small parcels. A modest house requires at least 200 square meters and would be better on 300 square meters of land. So, that means $3,000 at best for the land and likely more.
When it comes to the cost of construction materials, even very modest houses are not cheap in this global economy. In order to provide assistance to more families, we made the decision to keep costs down by not including interior plumbing or electric in the first houses we built. (This was in line with the housing in the area, but it was still a hard concession to make since our primary mission is building a nation, not simple relief.) We did improve the structural quality of the housing by including bonding beams at the bottom, middle and top of the walls and adding more windows. The cost of materials for these first houses ranged roughly from $5,000 to $6,000.
One way to lower the cost is to bring in materials directly in order to avoid local retail margins. This may save 15 to 20% as the building materials market is pretty competitive in Haiti. Non-profits could possibly even avoid paying taxes, which may save another 10% or more. This could reduce materials cost by 25 to 30%. But, even with these advantages, the cost of materials alone for the houses we have built would exceed $3,000.
Labor adds another $1,500. So all in, we might be able to build a house for as little as $8,000 on a reasonable piece of land—but for $3,000, no way.
By the way, our decision not to bring in our own materials is not laziness or a lack of appreciation for frugality. Rather, we chose not to do this for two reasons. First, we rely on the local commercial community to hire our students. We do not want to export our graduates to work at a building materials company in the United States, so we proudly support the local economy. Second, we also recognize that a government cannot offer services to its people if it does not have a tax base from which to draw revenue. No nation can survive without an economy.
Pricing a home at $3,000 may be a good marketing tool for attracting “charity dollars”, but it may build a house that a Haitian family cannot use any more than your uncle can use another sweater. The offer may sound like a great gift option for a picky or globally concerned friend, but who is it that really needs the right gift this Christmas?
We think it is the Haitians, so we are now considering how to add indoor plumbing and septic. This makes it important to build several houses at the same time and in the same area, because it would allow for the possibility of putting in a common well and septic without greatly increasing the cost of each house. Providing toilets and showers just seems like the dignified thing to do.
We have also begun to consider the feasibility of including 250 to 500 watts of solar with each house. This will provide environmentally responsible and locally available electricity, which would give children a better chance to study at night and provide the opportunity for a small freezer to help preserve food. It also offers a positive way to encourage Haitians to stop diverting electricity from the state power company’s lines, which much of the population sees as a necessary evil even as it hurts the country’s economic viability.
So, we are not actually looking for ways to building cheaper homes—we are hoping to be able to build more expensive ones. We are also working to stimulate a local mortgage market that will allow our employees to get a house the old fashioned way. After all, not every home needs to be a gift.