Why not spontaneous housing?
LAND invasions, shack demolitions … all kinds of misery. Bureaucracy flourishes, housing lists disappear, contractors make millions, new homes fall down … more misery.
Is there not a better way to handle our low-cost housing crisis? Let the people affected themselves resolve their issues?
Many years ago I encountered a housing project that seemed a model for Africa. It was at the small Angolan port of Lobito, where an insanitary shack district had developed in a fold of ground just outside the town. The place smelled worse than a turkey coop.
The mayor, a man named Orlando Costa, realised this could not be allowed to continue. But he had limited resources. So he put on his thinking cap.
He selected a healthy plateau just outside the town. He put in tarred roads and street lights. He set up water points. He marked off plots. He set up a brickworks. And then he sold the bricks at cost.
The slum emptied as fast as the the shackdwellers could build their new homes. There were no plans, no building regulations. A bricks and mortar mini-city sprang up in no time, every house different. Some were double-storey. Some were castellated. A man's home is his castle. It was astonishing to see.
And zero bureaucracy, no outside contracting. No plans? Costa laughed. "When a man builds his own home it doesn't fall down."
Maybe we should try something like this. Give those who need the housing the means to do it themselves. If Lobito is anything to go by, we could be surprised by human ingenuity and energy.
Whisky galore
LOBITO is a charming little place. It was once the export point for copper from Zambia and the Congo, though the Benguella Railway, which carried the copper to the coast, has long since been blasted out of existence by civil war and ideology.
Lobito was an innovator not just in spontaneous housing, it also had its own whisky. A label cunningly like the Bells one had some fine print: "Distilled in Lobito under the direction of two Scottish technicians." One imagined an unfrocked Presbyterian parson and the third mate of a tramp steamer watching a primitive still..
Alas – unlike the spontaneous housing – the whisky was not a success.
Wall of ice
A NINE-METRE wall of creeping ice from a lake destroyed 12 homes and damaged another 15 in Canada. Something very similar happened near a lake in the US.
At Ochre Beach, Manitoba, in Canada, strong winds pushed massive ice floes from Dauphin Lake onto nearby properties.
Home-owner Doug David said he heard the ice cracking and within five minutes a wall of ice rose from the lake so powerful that it ploughed though his two-storey home. It pushed furniture from one bedroom into another, with the bath being moved into the hallway.
Nobody was injured but lakeside properties had to be evacuated.
In the US, people living around Lake Mille Lacs in Minnesota watched in disbelief as ice crawled into doors and windows at Izatyz resort. The wall of ice had been pushed from the lake by high winds.
Yes, this global warming is getting out of hand.
Police recruit
A FUGITIVE from justice was caught by an alligator. It happened in Pinellas County, Florida, when police pulled over 20-year-old motorist Bryan Zuniga whose car had been weaving in and out of traffic lanes.
Zuniga jumped from his car and ran, breaking through a fence before disappearing. But then he was attacked by the alligator near a water treatment plant and bitten badly. He made his way to a hospital, where the police found him.
Arrested by an alligator – yes, the police are recruiting in the most unlikely quarters these days.
Not cricket
BEATLE meets grasshoppers … Sir Paul McCartney performed for three hours in Brazil while a huge cloud of grasshoppers swarmed about him.
Sir Paul was performing for charity before a crowd of 47 000 in Goiania. But he remained unfazed, introducing a grasshopper that had settled on his shoulder as "Harold".
Tailpiece
SHE HAD A terrible stutter. By the time she said she wouldn't, she had.
Last word
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
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