A week ago, Elizabeth Sheehan, the founder of Containers to Clinics, a nonprofit organization in Dover, Mass., was preparing to deploy the group’s first medical clinic overseas. Made from two shipping containers, it was to be sent to the Dominican Republic, where it would begin to fulfill the group’s long-term goal of building health care infrastructure in developing countries through networks of small container clinics in rural areas.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Containers to Clinics

PORTABLE This clinic includes two examining rooms, a laboratory and a pharmacy. Containers to Clinics of Dover, Mass., may soon send it to Haiti.

RSS Feed

• Get Science News From The New York Times »

Enlarge This Image

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

AFTERSHOCK Ronald Laventure, 15, was evacuated from a clinic on Saturday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, four days after a magnitude 7 earthquake.

Then, last Tuesday, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck the Dominican Republic’s neighbor, Haiti. Hospitals in the capital, Port-au-Prince, were destroyed or damaged, and basic medical care was practically nonexistent. Ms. Sheehan said her donors immediately started calling her. “They all said, ‘Why don’t you send it there?’ ” she said.

Now, the group may dispatch the clinic, which has two examining rooms, a laboratory and a pharmacy, to Port-au-Prince if a medical team and supplies can be arranged.

“It can be used in this disaster situation,” Ms. Sheehan said, and then left in Haiti or sent on to Bani, on the Dominican Republic’s south coast, to fulfill the original mission. “We are committed to long-term primary health care for women and children.”

Containers to Clinics is one of many innovative approaches to building or rebuilding infrastructure in developing countries, to help forestall disasters or, as in Haiti, recover from one. Among them are new ideas and projects to supply quality housing, clean water, proper waste treatment and affordable energy, in addition to health care.

Their promoters share a belief that while the conventional top-down approach, by governments and large relief agencies coming in with large projects, works for initial relief and recovery, long-term reconstruction — “building back better,” in the parlance of redevelopment specialists — requires more involvement of local people.

“You can’t just sweep in from outside and drop something in and say, ‘This is exactly what you need,’ ” said Laura Sampath, manager of the International Development Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It has to be almost driven from the community.”

The M.I.T. effort includes the D-Lab, whose instructors and students work on low-tech solutions to infrastructure problems and spend time in the field implementing them. Among the projects are ones to manufacture ceramic water filters in Ghana; install chlorine dispensers to treat drinking water in Kenya; and develop a bicilavadora, a pedal-powered washing machine, in Peru.

“We’re graduating engineers who realize it’s important to talk to people first,” Ms. Sampath said.

Ms. Sheehan said converting old shipping containers into clinics was just a first step; her group must find doctors and nurses to staff them, as well as drugs and supplies. “We’re committed to putting in the human system as well,” she said. So partnerships with local health groups are crucial.

At the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, a small nonprofit organization in San Francisco, projects are also developed from the ground up by providing support to local entrepreneurs, said Peter Haas, its founder.

Mr. Haas spoke while traveling to Haiti, where, before the earthquake, his group had been set to announce a competition for local entrepreneurs to develop plans for infrastructure projects. The competition has been delayed, and the group has added a new category: earthquake-resistant housing.

In Haiti, Mr. Haas’s group has already been helping Coopen, a business cooperative in Cap Haitien that will collect organic waste and human waste from public toilets and convert it to biogas, a fuel, for cooking. And in Guatemala, the group has aided a small company, XelaTeco, that builds hydroelectric projects for rural villages.

“We’re really not trying to dump some new expert solution on the population,” Mr. Haas said. Working through local businesses, he said, ensures that ideas that do not work do not stay around. “If a business fails and the market doesn’t accept the product, it disappears,” he said.

Malcolm G. Anderson, a professor in the School of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Bristol in England, said: “With a bit of support, the poorest people can provide infrastructure, they can do things. The fundamental thing is to change people’s behavior” by involving them in the effort.

With help from the World Bank, Dr. Anderson has undertaken projects in St. Lucia and elsewhere in the Caribbean to reduce disaster risk in hilly shantytowns. These unplanned urban areas typically have no drainage infrastructure, and heavy rains can saturate the ground, leading to mudslides.

• 1
• 2

Next Page »

More Articles in Science » A version of this article appeared in print on January 19, 2010, on page D1 of the National edition.

Job woes stifle Tampa’s real estate recovery

Overbuilt market endures slowing employment growth, pervasive negative equity problem

By Steve Bergsman, Friday, August 24, 2012.

Inman News®

Tampa, Fla., skyline image via Shutterstock.

Last year a reporter for an online news service asked me, “Which beaten-up market will come back quicker and stronger?” One of my responses was “Tampa, Florida.”

What I appreciated about Tampa was that unlike most other Florida metros, all of which were equally crunched during the Great Recession, this Gulf of Mexico port city boasted a diversified economy and less reliance on the low-paying tourist industry.

It was a counterintuitive call because earlier in the year, an S&P/Case-Shiller report listed Tampa as one of only nine cities in the country where prices were still at the lowest levels since the onset of the recession, meaning home prices had fallen even further than the lows set in spring 2009.

Indeed, 2011 wasn’t a good year for the Tampa housing market. The average sale price, which had a peak of $264,606 in December 2007, according to data from the Greater Tampa Association of Realtors (GTAR), fell all the way to a low point of $150,103 in February 2010. Then in January 2011, a new low was reached at $134,856, before the market bounced back.

Article continues below

Advertise with Inman

So, did that mean I guessed wrong? Not necessarily. At best I could say my optimism about Tampa was just a bit premature, because 2012 has begun to look like a comeback year for the city and the state.

Sunshine has returned to Florida and to its real estate markets. Florida and Tampa are going through a “mini-recovery,” declared John Tuccillo, chief economist for Florida Realtors.

According to Sally McFolling, GTAR president and director of sales and marketing at Homes by WestBay in Lithia, Fla., home prices in the Tampa metro have been rising all year. The data supports McFolling’s assertions. In January, average sale price stood at $143,940; then in the most recent numbers (from May) prices had risen monthly to hit $170,698, a substantial movement!

So, is the city in recovery mode?

I checked in with Stanley Geberer, an economist and senior associate with Fishkind & Associates Inc., an Orlando-based economic consulting firm. Geberer gave me a brief history of Tampa’s housing woes.

The metro generally includes Tampa in Hillsborough County; the sister city of St. Petersburg in Pinellas County; and various suburbs in other counties.

“St. Petersburg is an older city, and Pinellas County is technically built out,” Geberer said. “To the north of Hillsborough is Pasco County, home to Tampa’s bedroom communities, which was highly overbuilt and overpermitted. Many tens of thousands of vacant lots were approved for construction and the inventory of vacant lots is very high. In Hillsborough, the inventory of vacant lots approved was not as high as in Pasco.”

Here’s the problem, Geberer said: “The volume of residential units that were built at high prices and sold at high prices are now underwater. In terms of discontinuity, it created about 100,000 foreclosures since 2009. For 2012, we expect 15,000 to 16,000 new foreclosures and 10,000 more in 2013.”

Geberer is not so enthusiastic about Florida’s mini-recovery. “Generally, single-family home prices declined throughout Florida in 2011 and at least through the first quarter of 2012. Depending on what market you are in, prices have continued to slip or flatten out. There are no markets in the state seeing robust price increases.”

To which he added, “Florida is lagging the recovery in the rest of the nation because it is a very growth-dependent state, meaning it is dependent on the construction industry, which has been devastated. Secondly, since we are growth-dependent we are host to a lot of migrating residents, people who move down from the north. But, they can’t move down here until they sell their homes up north.”

The solution to the recovery, said Geberer, is for the state to generate new jobs. Easier said than done.

In Tampa, Geberer said, the metro of almost 3 million people generated 36,000 jobs in 2011 and expects another 32,000 in 2012. Good, but not great.

“Tampa’s unemployment rate is about 8.2 percent, which sits under the state’s unemployment rate of 8.4 percent,” McFolling said. “It’s nothing to get excited about, but we have seen companies move in, financial firms expanding and the military base (MacDill Air Force Base) generating jobs.”

If employment and job creation are the keys, then there are still concerns about Tampa.

Lesley Deutch, a vice president with John Burns Real Estate Consulting, recently issued a report titled, “Florida’s Housing Market Is Booming, But Will It Last,” in which she writes: “Every month, we analyze a litany of statistics for our research clients, and we have been pointing out a disturbing trend. Florida’s employment growth is slowing.

“Florida currently has the slowest year-over-year payroll employment growth of any region in the nation. Of the 20 metropolitan areas in Florida we analyze, 12 of them are now experiencing year-over-year job losses. While the larger metropolitan areas (Tampa, Orlando, Miami and Jacksonville) are still experiencing year-over-year job gains, the pace is slowing.”

According to John Burns’ research, in November 2010, Tampa employment growth was about 10,000 annually. That rose to about 40,000 at the end of last year. By the start of the second quarter this year, the numbers dropped back down to the 25,000 range.

Nevertheless, McFolling remains optimistic. Taking a look at Tampa’s real estate market, she is very encouraged by the inventory picture. Back in 2007, inventory rose to almost 25 months.

In May 2012, that number had dropped all the way down to 3.7 months. Of that, about 28 percent or 29 percent are REOs and short sales, McFolling said. Back in that difficult year of 2007, almost 22,000 homes were in inventory. That number has declined to 7,770 homes.

Although, new home building has picked up in Tampa, Geberer expects the city’s continued but moderate job formation pace will help clear residential inventory. Still, he said, “Prices will remain flat until inventory will be worked through.”

Or as Deutch cautioned, “Monitor the Florida economy carefully if you are investing there!”

Steve Bergsman is a freelance writer in Arizona and author of several books. His latest book, “Growing Up Levittown: In a Time of Conformity, Controversy and Cultural Crisis,” is now available for sale on Amazon.com.

Contact Steve Bergsman:
Email	Letter to the Editor

Copyright 2012 Inman News

All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News. Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright law.

• Email
• Share This

• Comments
• Reprint Rights
• Community Guidelines