Earlier in the spring, Mr. Bellerive and Mr. Voltaire, who is an architect and urban planner, had visited Mr. Clinton at his home in Chappaqua, N.Y. At one point, Mr. Clinton kept getting distracted by incoming e-mail messages. According to Mr. Voltaire, Mr. Clinton said, “If I receive one more suggestion for the ideal house for Haiti, I will explode.” And Mr. Bellerive said, “You, too?”

After that, the government hired a London firm to solicit and sift through proposals for “the best, safest and most sustainable housing designs of the future. “In October, several dozen model homes will be built and displayed at a housing expo in Oranger, Haiti. People will be selected to live in the prototypes and to evaluate them, Mr. Voltaire said.

Eventually, permanent housing will be built, he said, at one of a few sites that the government is seizing through eminent domain and hoping to turn into new population centers.

One of those sites is Corail-Cesselesse, about 10 miles north of Port-au-Prince, where the first planned tent city was installed in April on a chalky gravel plane. Hastily created for displaced people who seemed most at risk from flooding or landslides in another camp, it is now home to about 5,000 who live in an orderly grid of white tents far from their bustling urban neighborhood.

Some aid groups criticize the location. “That site does not represent clear strategic thinking on the part of the government,” said Ms. Schindall of Oxfam. “It’s like the Sudan. There’s not a tree in sight. And people feel marooned. They are having major issues finding income-generating activities and soon they are going to have trouble feeding themselves. It’s inevitable.”

But several residents interviewed seemed willing to tolerate the camp’s remoteness because living there puts them in line for the transitional shelters that are supposed to be erected there, and then for the permanent houses that may follow.

Jean Mérite Pierre, a mason, asked visitors to accompany him to the barren land.

“Look at all this space,” he said, sweeping his arms over an empty lot. “All those people who died lived in houses that collapsed like dominoes. So even if we are uprooted, life could be better here. We were renters, almost all of us. Here, maybe we can own a house someday. That’s what they say. You have to believe them.”