After a devastating earthquake shook Gyumri in 1926, several trailer parks were set up in the city. Gyumri was rebuilt in Soviet times, but these trailer parks, also called barracks, were never dismantled, and they became a symbol of poverty. They withstood the 1988 earthquake and are still there today. Anyone in Gyumri can tell you where the Avznotz, Sevyan, and Tekstil barracks are. It's hard to believe that these were once wooden trailers, since their residents, having given up any hope of receiving apartments, have hidden the wooden shells behind stone walls. They have hidden the wood, but not the misery which rules inside these walls.

After the 1988 earthquake, trailer parks once again sprang up in Gyumri. According to Albert Margaryan, head of the Shirak Marz (province) urban reconstruction department, today there are at least 7,000 trailers that still have to be relocated. "By the way," Margaryan noted, "that doesn't mean that the number of homeless people is proportional to the number of trailers." According to a report of March 1, 2004, which was presented to the state government by the regional authorities, there are 2,800 people in need of housing in Gyumri. A couple of months later, however, the Gyumri City Council produced a different number - 4,300.

"It's not because of us that these numbers are contradictory, even though the mayor tries to argue that it is," Margaryan insisted. "He says the regional government is artificially lowering the number, as if we are trying to please the president and make the government's task easier. We merely showed the list of homeless people before March 1, 2004. After that the census of the homeless continued and the number grew to 4,300."

The difference is 1,500 people without housing. Does that mean that the government won't take responsibility for them? Margaryan maintains that it is in government's interest that all homeless people receive apartments. The construction of new housing stopped in the city in 2005, and no reconstruction work is planned for 2006, either. The government has until now attempted to address the problem through the voucher program, which actually only aims to provide support. "One can buy an apartment by adding to the amount provided by the voucher, and if one finds housing for less than the face value of the voucher, one can spend the difference however one wants. To implement the program, which was intended to provide apartments for 350 homeless families, the government provided 1 billion drams (2 million dollars). The program will be continued next year," Margaryyan explained, adding that that the program would continue as long as there was a need for it.

"Currently, it is cheaper to buy an apartment than to build one. That's not normal. On the other hand, when it is no longer be possible to buy an apartment with a voucher, then the government will start thinking about building new housing. It will take time for equilibrium to be achieved in the real estate market." One wonders what's more important to government officials--equilibrium in the real estate market or the need to provide homes for people who have spent the last seventeen years living in trailers. Homeless people in Gyumri think it was wrong to shift funds from housing reconstruction to the voucher program. Not everyone can afford to add the money necessary to purchase apartments with decent living conditions. As for buying cheaper housing in villages, often this does not work out well. People who have lived for years in the city are unable to adapt to village life and end up selling their house and moving back to Gyumri's trailer parks.

Mkrtich Chalikyan, for example, lives in Trailer # 227/205 in the Fantanner trailer park with his mother, his wife, and their four young children. The trailer is six meters long and has only four beds. The Chalikyans' 12-year- old son sleeps on the floor.

The trailer belongs to Chalikyan's mother. The rest of the family occupied a neighboring trailer until two years ago, when they bought an apartment and moved away, only to return to the trailer park three months later. The Chalikyans had purchased a house in the village of Gyullubulad using vouchers from Urban Institute. Housing in Gyumri was too expensive; there were no two-room apartments for less than $4,500. "The house used to belong to a Turk, it was half falling down. They [the Urban Institute] gave us $3,142. We spent $600 on bribes and bought the house for $900. We used the rest to pay off our debts, and hoped to live at least a year in the village. But it didn't work out. The money we had disappeared so quickly we didn't know how it happened. There was no work in the village. I worked as a barber in the Shirak Hotel for years, and I also knew how to repair shoes, but I couldn't make use of either of those skills in the village. We lived there for three months, and then somehow managed to sell the house for $500. Nobody wanted it, so we had to price it below what we paid for it."

As a result of voucher program, the Chalikyans are now in an impossible situation. No longer considered homeless, they are back in the trailer park. And they will stay there until they are forced to relocate.

The first trailer to greet visitors to Fantanner belongs to Varsenik Alekyan, eighty-six years old. She, too, seems to be here for good. In 2003, the mayor offered her an apartment in one of the new apartment buildings along the Yerevan Circle Road, but she did not accept the offer. "I told him I am an old single women, I have no children or relatives, give me a place nearby so that my neighbors can take care of me. He said he had given all of them away already." Varsenik Alekyan has given up hope of ever having an apartment. "I've been thinking it would be good to have a better home in heaven. I've lived for so long, I don't have so long to live. They'll probably take me to the cemetery from this trailer."

Photos by Onnik Krikoryan