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Haiti Construction
After a meager annual growth rate of 1.8 percent a year
in
the 1960s, construction boomed in the 1970s, expanding
nearly 14
percent a year, faster than any other sector except
assembly
manufacturing. From the 1970s onward, the construction
industry
had concentrated on infrastructure developments,
industrial
structures related to the assembly subsector, and
extravagant
residential housing in Port-au-Prince and its exclusive
suburb,
Pétionville. The growing demand for construction caused
cement
output to increase from 150,000 tons a year in 1975 to
220,000
tons a year by 1985. Growth was positive, but uneven, in
the
1980s, mainly as a result of political and economic
turmoil. The
construction industry generally failed to benefit Haiti's
poor,
who continued to build their own dwellings with a mixture
of raw
materials, mostly wood and palm thatch in rural areas and
corrugated metal, cardboard, or wood in urban shantytowns.
Data as of December 1989
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