In 2009, the cost of dealing with construction permits in Haiti was about 570% of income per capita.
Here is the source post, with further information. Had I mentioned that perhaps as much as eighty percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is homeless?
Tracking that post backwards reveals detailed information about the costs and procedures, which are indeed unnecessarily convoluted and tangled. But let’s not pin all the blame on excessive or inefficient government bureaucracy here.
In practice, building permits are often not obtained, anyway – or they’re obtained after the structure is already erected. Bribes are common. What we have here, Tyler, is a massive market failure. Contractors are sold substandard materials – sand is added to dilute the concrete and stretch it further, Concrete Masonry Units are manufactured in small batches and often fail to conform to specifications, and the steel reinforcing bars (rebar) may not be of an adequate grade or diameter. Then the contractors scrimp and save by deviating from designs, inserting less rebar than is called for, substituting cheaper materials, or building without the formal services of a structural engineer at all. The outward appearance of the building may be fine. But it’s a hollow shell, ready to collapse.
The government failure is relevant only because the market has already failed. The way to curtail these practices is to police abuses with a strong regulatory regime. Given the abject failure of the state to effectively police any other aspect of society, it seems unlikely to me that these practices are going to be reversed overnight.
There’s another, more immediate solution that can be applied while we’re waiting for Haitian government to function with some modicum of effectiveness: Western expertise. Haiti lacks trained structural engineers or construction managers, who are used to designing buildings that actually stand up in earthquakes. America does not. To its credit, the American Society of Civil Engineers has solicited its members to volunteer to work in Haiti. It has a list of more than a thousand names already compiled.
This is one area where NGOs must not be deferential to local practices or beliefs. We just ran that experiment – local construction practices flunked. At the Canadian reconstruction conference, or some other suitable venue, all NGOs active in Haiti, and all foreign sovereign donors and international institutions, should sign a pledge not to contribute to or directly fund the construction of any new building in Haiti, unless the plans have been certified by a qualified engineer to meet code, and the construction itself supervised by an independent inspector. This will, to be sure, raise the costs of reconstruction and slow its pace. But the pool of available volunteers will limit that problem. And are we really interested in erecting another set of collapsible buildings?
Robert:
Not quite. If a Haitian wishes to build or repair a structure on land he owns, with his own funds, that’s between him and his government.
What I’m saying is that there are billions of dollars of aid poised to be poured into Haiti for reconstruction. This is a nation that built plenty of structures over the past few decades, almost none of which proved capable of standing up to an earthquake. And geoscientists are telling us that, as best they can tell from the preliminary data, the stresses released in this quake have been redistributed within a few miles along the fault line, setting the stage for further quakes of equal magnitude. The last devastating earthquake took place during a century-long progression of quakes along this fault line. We may well be entering another such period.
In those circumstances, outside parties who wish to fund the erection of new structures in Haiti have a moral and practical obligation to ensure that the new structures prove more reliable than the old ones. We just conducted an empirical exercise, at staggering cost, which demonstrated the incapacity of the Haitian government to ensure the safety of buildings in the country. Notably, even government buildings failed to withstand the quake. Take a look at the Ministry of Public Works. Here’s a hint – this isn’t a permitting problem. It’s a means and methods problem.
There are two levels on which this problem must be solved. The longterm approach requires a single national building code, uniform training and certification of engineers, better pay and training for inspectors, streamlined permitting, and consolidation of the multiple agencies involved in the process. That’s great. But here’s the catch – it’s going to take time. And the results will necessarily be imperfect. Which leads to a rather brutal choice for aid groups. They can wait the months and years necessary for these reforms to be fully implemented, or they can fund the construction of a new set of death-traps as flawed as the old ones.
Of course, there’s a third option, which is what I was advocating. Donors have the right to stipulate conditions for their aid. And any donor to Haiti has a moral obligation to stipulate that the building be designed to appropriate standards, and that it be independently inspected during all phases of construction. There’s perfectly good evidence that they can do this, to answer your question – it’s what they do when they fund construction almost anywhere else in the world. In most nations, this sort of thing is legally required, and enforced by appropriate agencies. In Haiti, there’s a vacuum. So it’s up to outside funders to impose these standards upon themselves, because no one from the government is going to impose them.
I don’t think that’s all that complicated. And, frankly, your inclination to bristle at the notion that outside agencies might ensure that their delivery of services (in this case, reconstructing ruined buildings) is up to basic standards is somewhat naive. This is what aid agencies do. They don’t generally do it with construction, because in most cases, established norms and government regulations mean it’s not something on which they have to focus – they can simply hire a contractor, and leave it in his hands. In Haiti, that’s not the case – the contractors are directly and almost uniformly responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands in the sub-standard buildings they erected. They can’t be trusted to do better this time, without direct supervision. And so it’s incumbent upon aid agencies to provide such supervision.
Ken:
The problem is deeper than that. Not only is the record-keeping shoddy and inconsistent, and not only have many of those records now been destroyed, but a large percentage of the Haitian people were living on land they did not own -squatting, in other words. It would be incredibly helpful if the Haitian government were to put in place a framework to establish squatter’s rights, allowing its people to stake out claims by longterm established residence. But I’m not holding my breath. It’s a mess, and will likely continue to be a mess.
In reviewing the factors that got the Bush administration out of its tax cut job losses, I note the several massive government infrastructure programs of the Bush administration.
The first was almost totally unseen: the construction of multiple large “temporary” cities in late 2003 and 2004 that created shortages of building materials and drove up their prices. These cities house today about 200,000 people in what in Haiti before the earthquake would be seen as luxury accommodations. I’m old enough to remember the temporary WWII “military” housing built in the US that was still in use in the 60s – anyone remember the WWII Quonset huts? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quonset_hut
These cities were built in Iraq, of course. They were built with all the services needed for a city, water, sewage, electricity, in the middle of nowhere. There were built very rapidly, and are still, I assume, in good shape and not falling down, having survived lots of residents who didn’t have any sense of ownership, and in pretty harsh environmental conditions. The construction of these cities overcame the job destruction of the tax cuts and created some jobs in the US.
Then Katrina, and the other one, forced about a trillion dollars in transfers from the Federal government to a dozen states, and massive infrastructure spending, plus the building of many (hundreds?) small towns. That spending is still going on and making the economy of the worst hit areas look really great.
And the economy of Iraq around the cities consrcted there, and as I noted in the Gulf coast, really benefited from the US government infrastructure spending, while the overall US economy benefited. A program to ship to Haiti the materials the US shipped to Iraq to build new temporary cities in the same fashion, would provide much needed housing in Haiti for many more people, while boosting the US economy.
Haiti’s government with the UN has identified I believe 40 temporary cities. I would suggest the US might profitably propose to supply as well, light rail to connect them to Port-au-Prince in hub-spoke with low speed trolley cars. The rail can be prefabbed in sections with concrete/composite rails in the US initially, transferring the assembly to Haiti. Building the rail bed and laying the track would be done as it was in the US in the 19th century by unskilled labor. Shipping stripped down trolley cars to Haiti would let Haitians customize them for passengers and cargo. The rails were the key to US economic development, and were heavily subsidized by US government.
For the housing and transportation system, the use of standard components intended for standard building blocks – like the Quonset Hut and rail in hub-spoke – eliminates the need for building codes and city planning.
Water and sanitation can be provided in a standard fashion, like in Iraq military cities. The assembly and piping can be done by manual labor according to standards set by the prefab design. Cooking facilities by supplying “coleman” stoves – another standard component. Manufacture of such stoves – standard sheet steel for the most part, can be setup quickly in Haiti, after the initial surge of supplies.
The innovation (not invention) of the US has been the heavy reliance on standard interchangeable parts for everything to allow mass production of housing to transportation quickly using unskilled and semiskilled labor. Haiti has plenty of the latter, and by employing them in large numbers doing the mass production will very quickly lead those individuals to see the ways to adapt to Haiti the same mass production and standards based practices.
Had Haiti’s building code licensing been cheaper, perhaps more builders would have bothered building to code.
Why? Paying the license is a sunk cost.
My dad is actually in Haiti right now and trying to kickstart a project to rebuild houses in PAP and is looking for investors and workers. What would you suggest he do to get this off the ground?
I love what the world bank shows for Haiti versus The Dominican Republic.
Haiti – 11 steps(permits?) that span 1,179 days (no wonder they bride)
Dominican Republic – 17 steps that span 214 days
http://www.doingbusiness.org/
Even now with all the monetary aid that was sent, there are 1.5 million people homeless in Haiti. It’s ridiculous that there is no accountability and that more hasn’t been done in rebuilding. http://www.beyondyourdoor.com
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