Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic: The Society and Its Environment
Republic was 56 percent urban, and Santo Domingo had 40
percent of the urban population. The United Nations Demographic
Yearbook, 1996 estimated the country to be almost 62
percent urban in 1995.
Santo Domingo approximately doubled its population every
decade between 1920 and 1970. Its massive physical expansion,
however, dates from the 1950s. The growth in industry and
urban construction, coupled with Trujillo's expropriations of
rural land, fueled rural-urban migration and the city's growth.
In 1993 the city had slightly more than 2 million inhabitants.
The republic's second and third largest cities, Santiago de los
Caballeros and La Romana, also experienced significant
expansion in the 1960s and 1970s. Santiago, the center of traditional
Hispanic culture, drew migrants from the heavily populated
Cibao. La Romana, in the southeast, grew as a center of
employment in the sugar industry as well as a tourism center; it
was also the site of the country's first industrial free zone (see
Manufacturing, ch. 3). The two cities continued to grow
throughout the 1980s and early 1990s while the sugar industry
declined—replaced by expanding industrial free zones and
tourism in La Romana. In 1993 the population of Santiago de
los Caballeros stood at 488,291 and that of La Romana at
141,570.
Population growth and rural-urban migration have strained
cities' capacity to provide housing and amenities. Nevertheless,
in 1981 nearly 80 percent of city dwellings had access to potable
water; 90 percent had limited sewage disposal; and roughly
90 percent had electricity. These percentages subsequently
declined because the provision of such services did not keep
up with the general increase in population as well as with the
continued rural-urban migration. For example, a Pan American
Health Organization (PAHO) report estimated that in
1993 the potable water supply reached 65 percent of the population:
80 percent were in urban areas and 46 percent were in
rural areas (only 25 percent of rural communities had drinking
water services). Sewage disposal services covered only 16 percent
of the entire population, and 28 percent of the urban population
had apartment or house connections. (According to
the 1993 Dominican census, 214,354 of the country's 1,629,616
dwellings lacked sanitary services.) Finally, the PAHO report
indicated that 81 percent of the dwellings had electricity.
By the mid-1980s, there was an estimated housing deficit of
some 400,000 units; by 1990 estimates, 600,000 dwellings were
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