Tour the PermaShelter Factory   We are pleased to offer tours of our factory located at Terminal Abraham in Carrefour.  Come see how we are building homes, creating jobs, and giving hope to those in our local community.  PermaShelter is currently constructing 1,000 homes for a major NGO on the mainland while also building homes on the island of La Gonave.  See firsthand our manufacturing processes and capabilities. Tours are available Wednesday, March 16 & Thursday, March 17 at 10 AM and 2 PM.  Simply click HERE to sign up for a tour of our facility.

The Manufacturer’s Minute   Manufacturers have a unique perspective on the reconstruction, and we would like to take just a minute to share this perspective with you, are partners in the reconstruction of Haiti.  This is a regular feature that will appear weekly in the PermaShelter Weekly Digest. We here at PermaShelter are excited about the prospect of continuing to build homes for the Haitian people.  It is great to see an open, transparent bidding process–as we believe that such transparency is essential in fostering accountability in the distribution of donor funds.  One thing we’ve noticed, though, is that the process sometimes fails to give adequate weight to a bidder’s demonstrated capacity and performance capability in favor of other considerations such as company size, overall bid price, etc. Most tenders make provisions for taking these other factors into consideration.  Doing business in Haiti is very challenging, and costs can spiral out-of-control very quickly due to demurage charges, unexpected fees at port, delays due to social and political unrest, and myriad other factors that we have all experienced. We challenge organizations that are letting tenders to ask themselves “Has this supplier worked in Haiti?  Are they committed resources to being on the ground here?  Are they hiring Haitian workers, supervisors, and managers?  Are they giving back to their local community here in Haiti?” Organizations working in the Haiti reconstruction effort have the opportunity to both preserve the bottom line and to serve the double and triple bottom line.  Asking yourself these questions during the bid evaluation process may lead you in some exciting directions. Matt Williams, MPA Director of Communications & Government Affairs Harbor Homes, LLC

About Us The Harbor Homes family of companies includes PermaShelter S.A., Intrepid Structures, and Outlast Emergency Products. Harbor Homes manufacturers, delivers, and assembles a wide range of disaster relief housing, transitional shelters, permanent homes, field support structures, and other non-food item (NFI) relief supplies throughout the Caribbean, Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Harbor Homes is also the exclusive distributor of the Concrete MD concrete mixer in Haiti.

Mar 10, 2011 08:30 ET

PermaShelter S.A. Manufacturing Emergency Shelters for Export to Latin America

Haitian Company Sees Opportunity to Create Export While Helping Region Cope With Aftermath of Flooding

CARREFOUR, HAITI–(Marketwire – March 10, 2011) – In a heartwarming story of overcoming adversity, Haitian company PermaShelter S.A. has begun to manufacture transitional shelters for export to Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil in response to the severe flooding that has left hundreds of thousands homeless in South America over the past several months.

According the PermaShelter spokesperson Neil Jean-Luis Paul, “While we are in the disaster housing business, our real business is turning lemons into lemonade. PermaShelter has been searching for opportunities to build transitional shelters (also called t-shelters) in Haiti, but it is very difficult for a Haitian company to be awarded the contracts here. In our effort to keep our employees working, we have turned our attention toward helping those left homeless in South America. We have the expertise to build well-engineered homes and ship them to South America. And that is what we plan to do.”

“We have developed a permanent home in several sizes ranging from 18 m² to 30 m²,” says Matt Williams, Director of Communications & Government Affairs for PermaShelter. ”These homes are engineered to withstand substantial wind loads and seismic activity, and they incorporate materials that are impervious to rot and insects. A fully furnished home costs less than a small used car, and it is rated to last at least 25 years.”

The company is adapting its materials and design to better reflect Latin tastes in architecture. ”Providing a culturally relevant product is very important,” says Jean-Luis Paul. ”We are consulting with housing experts in the various countries to ensure that our products meet the varying needs expressed in different localities.”

PermaShelter S.A. has a lot of experience building disaster relief housing, having previously been contracted to build about 2,000 transitional shelters in Haiti. PermaShelter’s parent company, Harbor Homes, LLC, is a major supplier of disaster relief housing to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and currently holds a $153 million contract with this agency.

More information can be found online at http://www.permashelter.com

Hundreds of thousands of homeless survivors from Haiti’s 2010 earthquake are likely to be still living in camps at the end of this year because of slow and faltering resettlement efforts, the International Organisation for Migration said on Friday, as Reuters reports.

The Geneva-based IOM’s warning reflected concerns that reconstruction work in the poor, earthquake-battered Caribbean state may be losing momentum as donor funding and interest wanes amid political instability following recent elections.

IOM officials said that although numbers of displaced people living in camps had fallen from an estimated high of 1.5 million in July to 810,000 in January, current plans by Haiti’s government and aid partners would not provide sufficient housing to resolve the displacement crisis this year.

all the more reason to continue apace building and assembling PermaShelter homes and cluster communities for resettling displaced population out of camps and individual shelters like the one shown above.