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Comment by Gupie | Hacker News Reader

$500M sound like a large sum. It is if that is you personal wealth. However for Haiti with a population of over 10M it is only $50 per head.

According to the article the Red Cross built shelters for 130,000 people. The would be $384 per shelter if that was all the Red Cross did. But they also fed people, provided clean water, medical aid...

It is easy to attack big charities. You get support from people who feel guilty for being mean bastards, for people who don't like foreign organisations, from big business who want to profit out of natural disasters...

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The article later clarifies that the Red Cross did not, in fact, build shelters for 130,000 people. According to the Red Cross' documentation, many of those people attended a seminar on home repair or were provided temporary shelters.

This is not the first time the Red Cross has had problems aseembling or executing a cohesive plan. Indeed, this seems to be a problem all of these large aid organization suffer.

> The American Red Cross says it "provided homes" for more than 130,000 Haitians, but acknowledges that much of that is made up of people who went to a training seminar on how to fix their homes, received temporary rental help or lived in shelters like these in Bon Repos, which start to disintegrate after three to five years. Residents say they don't have bathrooms, kitchens or running water.

I think the 130k people number is a big fat lie.

Stolen from the top comment on Reddit:

> Providing homes does not equate building a brand new home. Why would people think that?

>> When land was not available for new homes, the Red Cross provided a range of housing solutions including rental subsidies, repairs and retrofitting of existing structures, fulfilling our promise to ensure tens of thousands of Haitians are back in homes

> Red Cross takes a tough stance in NOT paying off greedy government officials. Saying there was a lack of land is the same thing as saying they couldn't justify paying outrageous prices for land. Many charities have to enter environments like these knowing they are going to be inundated with scammers. And that's the kind of news they don't need, being tricked into doing business with them.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/38nkp8/the_red_cr...

How about this little gem from their response[0] to the NPR article, where they talk about the "myth" that they call "temporary, or t-shelters, permanent homes."

> In no place has the Red Cross called a t-shelter a permanent home. We consistently refer to the range of housing solutions that the Red Cross has offered in Haiti to provide people safe housing.

So, essentially, they admit that they're not going to call it "permanent housing", but if they include those numbers under the banner of a "range of solutions" then they can continue to make public claims with numbers that look happy.

----

[0] http://www.redcross.org/news/press-release/13-Facts-about-th...

Just wanted to note that even if each home is for one person, $500,000,000/130,000 is $3,846, not $384. If you assume the average family size is 5, that jumps to $19,230 per home.

It's $166/head counting every person in the area affected by the earthquake, and $2000/house counting all the houses destroyed by the earthquake. Most Haitians did not lose their homes to the quake.

Can $2,000 build a whole house? Even in Haiti? I would think 10x that for anything we would call a "house". Its not surprising there is a vast unmet need in Haiti given its poverty and the scale of the disaster.

Habitat, which has built several hundred houses in Haiti, estimates $4000-$6000 per "core house"; core houses are expandable, seismically sound permanent housing structures.

Habitat also estimates 105,000 "totally destroyed" pre-quake houses.

Obviously, all of these numbers are better than the six houses the Red Cross built.

The larger problem in Haiti is legal, though: getting the rights to land to build on is complicated and slow.

Thanks! Seems like there is a market for durable "portable" structures that can be built on disputed land, and then moved if needed.

So you're suggesting a trailer park?

Sure. Millions of Americans reside in "trailer parks" at a standard of living that is the envy of much of the world, and surely orders of magnitude better than the situation in Cite de Dieu. Also, on their own terms, probably the envy of many a Manhattanite.

Haitians aren't looking for 2-car garages and island kitchens. Running water, electricity, and a structure that won't collapse in the next natural disaster would do just fine.

I imagine a challenge with deploying manufactured housing to Haiti is that anything new that's built needs to be earthquake-resistant.

If you had $500M, the best move for the community would be to create a Hati community long term investment of 100M. The community gets the dividends/interest from the investments. Long term sustainability is automatically achieved. That's free money over the long term for clean water projects, community buildings, etc.

Did Red Cross do that? Nope, people got tents and pocketed the rest.

Money doesn't build houses. People build houses. If they needed paper, the Haitian govt could just hand that out.

>> people got tents and [the Red cross] pocketed the rest

The red cross has a good accountability & transparency record:

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...

But no doubt some of the money unavoidably got misplaced

http://www.transparency.org/country#HTI

It appears you forgot to read the article. Charity Navigator has been using the same highly suspect numbers that the article analyses.

Click on the "news" tab on the CN page you cited, and you'll see that CN has put Red Cross on a "watch list" due to the recent reporting.

I think I agree with the sentiment, but your per shelter example is a poor one, it should be "per person sheltered". And any examples would benefit from comparisons to regional costs.

>>According to the article the Red Cross built shelters for 130,000 people.

Where do you see that? The article very clearly says that Red Cross reported building shelters for 130k people,but all in all, they built....6 houses.

In their response, the Red Cross pushes back fairly hard on the idea that they claimed to build shelters for 130,000 people:

http://www.redcross.org/news/press-release/13-Facts-about-th...

Specifically:

The Red Cross has provided more than 132,000 people with safe and durable housing, through a variety of methods.

In no place has the Red Cross called a t-shelter a permanent home. We consistently refer to the range of housing solutions that the Red Cross has offered in Haiti to provide people safe housing.

This January press release refers to "shelter programs":

http://www.redcross.org/news/press-release/American-Red-Cros...

Which doesn't seem like an attempt to claim built houses. It's a pain to find earlier stuff with search being clogged with this story.

The Red Cross report of building shelters for 130k people is mentioned 3 times in the article. No where does the article contradict this.

"To really understand what happened, take a look at one of the Red Cross' marquee projects — a housing project. [...] He explains in Creole that about three years ago the Red Cross came with glossy booklets saying it was going to build hundreds of new homes, a water and sanitation system and a health clinic. None of that happened."

"They never had a real plan for what they wanted to do in housing," Malany says."

"McGovern wrote an email to her senior staff in November 2013 saying that a particular housing project was "going bust.""

"Now the U.S. government is holding the money and is currently trying to find a different charity to run this 4-year-old housing project, which has yet to produce a single home."

"But if you go in search of those tens of thousands of new permanent homes in Haiti, you won't find them."

I don't know about you, but the general vibe I got from the article is that Red Cross has not provided the housing they said they provided. Even if they provided some, this further undermines the claim of providing shelter for 130k people:

"Not long ago, the charity hired a group of consultants to review one of its projects in the north of the country. They found the charity's math unreliable when it came to counting people it helped. There was double-counting, undercounting, and in one instance the Red Cross claimed to have helped more people than actually lived there."

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