Housing Project #1: Why

Today, President Álvaro Colom announced that the cost of rebuilding from Tropical Storm Agatha could exceed US$100 million dollars. And the winter has just begun. In the department of Soloá alone (where J.Crew shot it´s Spring 2010 catalog), 7,115 people were living in shelters on June 6th. The total death toll is estimated at 165, with millions of dollars in damage to infrastructure and crop lands. Now, Guatemalans will do what they did after Hurricane Mitch, Hurricane Stan, and countless other extreme weather events that devastated the country; they will rebuild right where their homes were before, using the same flimsy materials the used before, and continue to fear the rain.

Anyone that ever tried to re-paint sprawling urban slums as seas of willing entrepreneurs and promise was kidding themselves. For decades, and perhaps centuries, slums have served as an easy, free solution to problems of urban housing shortages and growing migration to urban areas. Slums are horrible places to live, and they need to me eliminated. Residents of slums lack opportunities because they are weighted down with vulnerability – to extreme weather events, disease, violence, hunger and thirst. This is a not a cheerful “Necessity is the Mother of Invention” situation. This is a situation in which literally millions, and globally billions of people suffer in squalor. Make no mistake. It is the responsibility of the international community, private enterprises that employ slum dwellers, national, municipal and city governments to eliminate, rather than rehabilitate slums in the developing world.

Most primary stakeholders write off public housing developments because they require more financial, institutional and technological resources than these developing world megacities have to spend. However, many cities´ slums are built on land that is uninhabitable, subject to mudslides every few years (Guatemala City, Rio de Janiero), and endangers public water sources (São Paolo). While the international community writes off public housing development as too expensive, millions that could be spent on viable, sustainable long term solutions will be wasted on repeated handouts for disaster relief, lives will be lost in deadly flash floods and mudslides, and more abstractly but perhaps most importantly, more individuals will be disabled by insecurity, unable to pursue their dreams and take advantage of even meager opportunities.

Marketing public housing to powerful, rich stakeholders requires an expert quantification of the long term social benefits of public housing, as well as a quantification, and monetization of the social costs of continuing with slum rehabilitation projects. I invite you to share your ideas on the social benefits and costs, and to await future information on how I seek to measure these things.

For more information on the effects of Agatha, please visit CONRED at http://conred.gob.gt/incidentes/2010/tormenta-tropical-agatha