Local residents brag that poverty housing has been eliminated in this rural county; so it’s ironic that one of the newest attractions in town is a re-creation of some of the world’s worst slum housing.
Rickety huts constructed of mud and cast-off corrugated metal, plastic, burlap and bamboo line a winding, narrow path at the Global Village & Discovery Center, a kind of housing theme park just a few blocks from the center of town.
Americans may worry about “affordable” housing, but much of the world is more worried about basic shelter, a fact dramatized at the village built by Habitat for Humanity International, based here.
“We wanted to be able to impress people in the importance of the mission,” said Michelle Dalva, executive director of the six-acre global village. “It’s a new way to get people involved in eliminating poverty.”
Surrounding the Living in Poverty slum housing exhibit are houses, modest by American standards, but typical of those built for poor people by Habitat volunteers in countries ranging from Mexico to New Guinea.
There are now 15 dwellings, most from Africa, Asia and Central America. All have different building styles and each is environmentally and culturally appropriate for its location. Officials plan eventually to expand the number of homes to 35 with examples from regions of Europe and South America.
There is also a Marketplace Center with theater, galleries, store and exploration center, as well as an area for demonstrations of brickmaking, roof-tile casting, stone construction and wood milling. More than 29,000 people have paid to visit the center since it opened in June, 2003.
“We are attracting people who know less and less about Habitat,” said Dalva, noting that the exhibit is drawing people beyond the group’s core supporters.
One of a number of organizations tackling poverty housing and homelessness, Habitat for Humanity is a non-profit ecumenical Christian group which counts among its volunteers former U. S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, who grew up and live 10 miles from Americus in Plains. Supporters of the village hope it will become one of the attractions along with Carter’s boyhood farm and Andersonville National Monument, site of the Civil War prison, in southwest Georgia.
Using donated labor and materials, as well as cash, Habitat builds and renovates homes for low-income buyers who participate in the construction along with the volunteers. No-interest loans are used to finance the purchase, with the payments going into a revolving fund to build more homes.
Local affiliates, which raise money and organize the projects, are asked to contribute 10 percent of fund-raising to projects in other parts of the world. By August,, the organization expects to have built 200,000 houses in 100 countries since its founding in 1976.
Every year thousands of U.S. volunteers help to build or rehabilitate homes. In the Chicago area there are 10 Habitat affiliates and another 10 affiliates at area high schools or colleges. Together the groups have built or rehabbed 459 homes.
And more than 350 Chicago-area residents have joined the teams of Global Village volunteers to work in other part of the U.S. or abroad.
To draw attention to the need, Carter has led major volunteer efforts abroad–last year in Mexico–and in the U.S. He and Mrs. Carter will head a Jimmy Carter Work Project with 4,000 volunteers in June in Benton Harbor and Detroit, Mich.
It is with disasters such as the recent tsunami in Asia, however, that many Americans learn about the deplorable housing elsewhere in the world.
One billion people, nearly a quarter of the world’s population, live in poverty housing or go without housing altogether, according to Habitat estimates.
The global village, built with donations specifically for the project, is an attempt to impress the international need–and the affordable solutions–on more Americans.
The mock slum represents the “kind of urban poverty that can be found in Africa, South American and Asia,” Dalwa said. Using pictures taken over the years, officials aimed to make the exhibit as authentic as possible, short of “raw sewage in the street,” Dalva noted.
The ramshackle dwellings illustrate such creative recycling as using a satellite dish for a roof, fashioning a door of broken shutters and making the lid of a car trunk into a canopy on a small food stand.
It takes a lot of work to keep huts in the exhibit from disintegrating, a problem not unlike the effort slum dwellers must make to maintain their minimal shelters, Dalwa said.
The exhibit’s huts are sparsely furnished with a mat on the floor, a stool perhaps, a few bowls for cooking or eating. For those who live in such hovels, Dalva noted the threat of collapse, fire and disease is constant.
The surrounding houses in the village are shown as alternatives to such inadequate shelter. A sign by each house identifies the country in which it is built and the approximate construction cost.
The median cost of an 1,100-square-foot Habitat home built in the U.S. is $53,000 for example. In contrast, the most expensive house in the global village is a compact Mexican home which is 500 square feet and costs $7,000, less than the cost of some high-end kitchen ranges in the U.S.
The Mexican cottage has electricity, indoor plumbing, a tiny, separate kitchen and glass windows, all elements that make it among the luxury dwellings in this compound.
It is built of a lightweight aerated concrete block, held in place with glue-like mortar and treated with a sealer to keep out water. Volunteers led by President Carter built similar homes in October in the Mexican towns of Puebla and Veracruz.
Only three of the 15 homes in the compound have electricity. Most have shutters or louvered windows, but not glass because it is expensive and easily broken when transported long distances.
Four have indoor plumbing, or a small, separate toilet room. A home typical of Ghana has a small separate building with kitchen, shower and composting toilet.
“People don’t live as Americans” in developing countries, Dalva said. They spend more time outside and live more communally than most U.S. families.
Extended families may share a few hundred square feet and live in two to four rooms. Many of the homes have concrete slab floors and a covered veranda or space shaded from the elements which acts as a kind of outdoor room for a variety of activities.
The largest room inside the dwelling is usually for eating and gathering. A kitchen with a simple fire stove for cooking and heating water may be in a small separate room. Generally there are only one or two rooms for sleeping.
Most of the houses are one-story designs and are similar in some cases to the simple weekend and resort cabins once common in the U.S.
A home typical of India, which is under construction, is the Global Village’s first two-story residence. A wood home on stilts, common in New Guinea, looks like some U.S. beach houses. The sheltered ground under the dwelling is used for animals and storage.
The keys to affordable housing are low-tech construction techniques and plentiful local materials, Dalwa said. Wood, at least for the countries in this exhibit, is not a common building material and is used sparingly in doors, shutters, maybe framing.
The 18-inch base of a house typical of the African country of Kenya, for example, is constructed by piling plentiful rocks and stones into a form and then pouring concrete to hold them in place.
Hand-made, sun-baked bricks, made on site using local clay and a sprinkling of cement, is common in construction around the world. Volunteers demonstrate how the clay-cement mixture is put together and packed into forms at the global village.
Once formed, the bricks are put onto a table or shelf to dry for several days. Homes made of such bricks are surprisingly durable and can last up to 50 years, Dalva said.
The biggest cost in many of the houses is the metal roof.
The Haitian home, at $6,700, is one of the most expensive homes in the exhibit. It is built of reinforced steel concrete block and has a curved concrete panel roof. The roof is designed to deflect strong winds and channel runoff from tropical downpours.
The high cost of land and land ownership seems to be a universal stumbling block to affordable housing. In some places around the world “it takes 3,000 steps to get title to the land,” Dalva observed, making home ownership a long and arduous process.
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The Global Village
Habitat for Humanity’s headquarters, located in Americus, Ga., provides information, training and a variety of other support services to Habitat affiliates worldwide.
– There are more than 2,300 active affiliates in 100 countries, including all 50 states of the United States, the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico.
– In 2005, the organization expects to have built 200,000 houses for 1 million people in 100 countries since its founding 29 years ago.
– Throughout the world, the cost of houses varies from as little as $1,100 in East Timor to a median of $53,300 in the United States.
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sstangenes@tribune.com
