PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A half-million Haitians who fled their shattered capital after the earthquake are starting to return to a maze of rubble piles, refugee camps and food lines, complicating ambitious plans to build a better Haiti.
Haitian and international officials had hoped to use the devastation of Port-au-Prince — a densely packed sprawl of winding roads and ramshackle slums that is home to a third of Haiti’s 9 million people — to build an improved capital and decentralize the country.
An estimated 500,000 people fled to the countryside in the days after the quake. Now some of those who fled are returning after enduring the rural misery that drove them to Port-au-Prince.
The government is powerless to keep people from returning, though Prime Minister Max Bellerive protested this week that Port-au-Prince cannot withstand another influx of people.
Alfredo Stein of the University of Manchester’s Global Urban Research Centre said planners must assume people will return.
Haiti plans to build camps with sanitation outside the city, but Stein said such efforts usually fail.
“You’re going to be constructing ghettos that are far away from where people will need to restore their economic lives,” he said.
