Filipino houses from debris and Californian fruit pickers’ homes win major award
SEATTLE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A project in the Philippines that used debris to rebuild typhoonravaged houses and Californian homes providing year-round housing for migrant workers won one of the world’s most prestigious housing awards on Tuesday.
The development charity CARE used innovative techniques, such as teaching building skills to residents and using wreckage from destroyed homes, to re-house more than 15,000
Filipino families devastated in 2013 by super-typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda).
“This is the first time self-recovery has been used on such a large scale,” said David Ireland, director of British charity World Habitat, which co-hosts the World Habitat Awards together with the United Nations (UN) settlement program, UN-Habitat.
“It has helped more people, more quickly, than traditional disaster recovery programs. The potential of this approach to be used elsewhere is absolutely huge.”
The winners of the competition, which was established in 1985, received 10,000 pounds and opportunities to share their ideas around the world.
The second winner was Mutual Housing, a not-for-profit affordable housing developer in Yolo County in northern California, which built the first permanent year-round homes for seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers.
Tens of thousands of workers are brought in from Central America at harvest time to do low-wage jobs, often living in sub-standard houses in government-funded migrant centers.
“It has been a complete 180 degree turn since we’ve been living here,” said Saul Menses, who moved into one of Mutual Housing’s 62 apartments and houses in Spring Lake, some 60 miles (97 km) northeast of San Francisco, in 2015.
“For five years, we lived in an apartment there that was very cold and in poor condition. My wife had to board the windows up with tape and unclog the sink daily.”