Haiti ignores landless plight of dispossessed who built Canaan
Haitians resettled in unoccupied area after 2010 earthquake want title deeds, taxation
ON A STREET of rocks and white dust in the centre of one of the world’s newest cities, Alisma Robert pointed to an array of electric cabling strung between rickety wooden poles.
“It wasn’t EDH that built that pole,” said Robert, referring to the Haiti’s national electricity provider. “It was us.”
Nearly everything in Canaan, which was founded in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake, was built by residents without government help.
After waiting two years for electricity, Robert and his neighbours collected money from each household, erected the wooden poles, and wired up the cables to the house of a family who were connected to the grid.
“I’m a citizen – but not for the moment. I don’t have the benefits of a citizen. We don’t have drinkable water … No public toilets. The government doesn’t do anything for the people who live here.”
Nearby, his wife sat at a rickety table selling bread and bags of sugar. Few people came to buy.
“I don’t have work,” said the 52-year-old former teacher.
Robert lost his job nine years ago when the earthquake destroyed the elementary school where he worked. The 7.0-magnitude quake that hit on January 12, 2010, levelled much of the capital Port-au-Prince and left 1.5 million Haitians homeless.
Estimates of the number of people killed vary widely – from 46 000 to as many as 316 000.
In the aftermath, international agencies helped to relocate some of the homeless families to empty land, 16km north of the capital. Others flocked there and within months, thousands had claimed plots.
At first, most lived in shacks or under tarpaulins, but eventually many laid concrete blocks for the foundations of their future homes and businesses. They planted fruit trees and grazed goats. Called Canaan, it has grown from a population of near zero to about 300 000.
A few months after the earthquake, then-president Rene Preval expropriated the land for the state.
To date, though, the state has not identified the previous owners or compensated them. Since the expropriation, several businesses and individuals have claimed that they were the rightful owners.
The law requires that the state identify the owners and pay compensation if necessary, said Leslie Voltaire, a Haitian architect and urban planner who has consulted for the government about Canaan.
Voltaire believes the land belongs to the state, so it “should be able to do a cadaster there and give land title”. That has not happened.
The ministry responsible declined a request for an on-the-record interview to discuss the land titling issue.
The spokesperson for the president’s office did not respond to a request for an interview.
Without title, residents risk losing any investment they make and cannot use their property as collateral.
“After I have my document, I can invest here,” Robert said.
“I could do anything I want – sell food, sell phone credit, start a hardware store … but no one is legalised.”
The head of the post-earthquake reconstruction office, Clement Belizaire, warned that without security of tenure the largely self-governed city could become a slum where land barons filled the void.
“This is a very delicate situation where the government has not yet compensated or officially identified owners. There’s a lot that needs to be put in order to make this viable,” he said.
The first requirement would be formalising settlements – identifying plots and giving residents the chance to register them, he said.
After that, the state could levy taxes, which residents say they want to pay in order to formalise their rights.
“It’s our land. We’ve lived on it for more than eight years, but we have no papers. If we die, there’s nothing to say our children get to have this,” said resident Etienne Manoly.
Paying taxes would obligate the state to provide roads, electricity, water, schools, hospitals and security.
“We have many needs from the central state,” said Manoly. The need for tax revenues saw the American Red Cross (ARC) fund an assessment in 2017 and 2018 of about a quarter of the estimated 40 000 homes and shops. It handed that data to the government so that nearby municipalities could levy taxes and invest that revenue into community projects.
Yet it remains to be seen whether municipal authorities will allocate money from their budgets to survey the rest of Canaan’s structures – although a representative from the nearby city of Croix-des-Bouquets said it had begun doing so.
One solution to the land dispute would be for the original landowners to seek payment from residents, with the government acting as a broker, said Louis Jadotte, a former UN-Habitat consultant in Canaan.
Experts from the UN and the ARC said the US Agency for International Development (USAID) would be wellplaced in helping raise tax revenues.
Between 2013 and 2018, USAID, through its Lokal+ programme, helped nine Haitian municipalities boost their tax take by 17% on average. One of those was Port-au-Prince’s Delmas district, which expanded its tax base: it has since rebuilt roads and pavements destroyed in the quake.
“Now all those roads are paved,” said Anna Konotchick, the former ARC programme manager for Canaan.
However, recognising people’s properties in order to tax them is not the same as granting permanent deeds that would legally secure their tenure, said Jadotte. Tax-related documents might just state that the municipality recognises the person is “occupying” that place and has built a certain structure on it, and that they are “paying their fair share in the form of government taxes or fees”, he said.
Even if USAID did fund a Lokal+ project, he said, its residents might be seen as illegal squatters in the government’s eyes.
“Land rights are not a black and white thing – it’s a continuum – and you can move it from uncertainty towards security with papers that say you’re the full owner.”
It’s our land … but we have no papers. If we die, there’s nothing to say our children get to have this ETIENNE MANOLY Resident