The ethnographic sample area of urban Haitian refugees is in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, Broward County, State of Florida. This is an area of mixed housing. It contains apartments in one and two-story cinderblock and stucco buildings, old wooden homes listing dangerously on their cinderblock footings, one multiunit compound fenced to suggest a camp, and several boarded-up buildings, one of which hosts constant drug deals and crack smokers. There are also four empty lots, jungled with untended overgrowth. Housing is scarred with signs of abuse: attempted entry and gunshot. Jalousies are missing panes or sport broken ones. Doors are studded with deadbolts. The overgrown lots are full of disintegrating furniture, tires, cans and garbage. Dumped appliances rot and rust in the swales. Huge dumpsters erupt with garbage and flies.