USAID/Armenia

EQZ Recovery Program
Success Stories

Housing Families in the Earthquake Zone

In December 1988, Garnik Shigiryan was working in the local machine tool factory and living with his wife in a two-room apartment on Yerevanyan Khjughi (Yerevan Avenue). The earthquake on December 7, 1988 destroyed both the factory where he worked and the apartment building where they lived. For the past twelve years, Garnik and his wife Maryan have lived in a temporary shelter. Like most residents in the area, Garnik and Maryan's temporary shelter was a metal shipping container, called a domic, which was used to ship humanitarian relief to the region after the earthquake. In the Yerevanyan Khjughi neighborhood alone there are over 700 families living in this kind of temporary shelter. Most domics do not have their own piped water or gas, and residents rely mainly on wood burning stoves or kerosene for heat and cooking. In summer, the temperatures inside domics often reach 100°F and fall below freezing in the winter.

For the past twelve years, the Government of Armenia and international donors have struggled to provide housing to the approximately 26,000 households still living in temporary shelter due to the 1988 earthquake. In 1999, USAID built on initial analyses supported by the World Bank to develop new and more cost-efficient models for re-housing these families. In March 2000, drawing on experience with a similar USAID program in Russia, USAID, with co-financing from the Government of Armenia, began implementing a pilot project to test the housing certificate model in the Yerevanyan Khjughi neighborhood in Gyumri.

On April 28, 2000, Garnik and Maryam, and their two young children, Artur and Tigran, received one of the first five housing certificates issued under the pilot project. According to Garnik, "when we agreed to participate in the project, we didn't really expect that we'd end up with an apartment -- after all, we've been promised housing for twelve years and we'd simply lost hope."

Within three months, the Shirigyan's were able to find an apartment and sign a sales agreement to purchase a new home. On July 11, 2000, Garnik and Maryan Shigiryan, and their two sons, Artur and Tigran, moved into a new three room apartment on the first floor of a stone building ten minutes by bus from their old neighborhood. "…through the HPC program it didn't take long at all for us to find an apartment. We are much more optimistic about the future now." When the Shigiryans moved into their new home, their former domic was removed, clearing land for future development and providing a visible sense of recovery to the neighborhood.

Since the beginning of the pilot project in March 2000, 237 certificates have been issued to eligible households, and more than 100 temporary shelters have been destroyed. Before this program began, local authorities had not removed a temporary structure, even when it had been vacated, in 6 years. In 2001, based on the experience of the pilot project, USAID will initiate a broader program in the earthquake zone, to meet the shelter needs of at least 4,000 households through the use of housing certificates and home improvement grants, within the framework of an integrated plan for redevelopment of the region.