NEEDING SHELTER
Half of Puerto Rico’s housing was built illegally, and then came Hurricane Maria
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico— Gladys Pena built a home the way many thousands of people in Puerto Rico, maybe most, did for decades: in makeshift fashion.
Every week for years, Pena, a cafeteria cook, set money aside until she had enough to buy a vacant wooden shack in a densely packed working-class barrio, a one-time squatters’ community a short stroll from the towers of San Juan’s Golden Mile financial district. She knocked down most of the flimsy house, bought building materials bit by bit and gradually built herself a concrete-block first floor with little more than a kitchen in it, and then a wooden second story topped by a corrugated zinc roof.
Her builders were guys from the neighborhood. Her son salvaged a rusty steel stair from an abandoned building nearby and affixed it to the front of the tiny house so she could get from the kitchen to her second-story bedroom suite, which requires going outside. To hook up to electrical power, she took out a $2,000 bank loan.
Like virtually all her neighbors in Las Monjas, one of eight adjacent communities in the larger Cano Martin Pena enclave that’s home to 26,000 people, Pena had no blueprint for her house. No permits. No inspections. No insurance. Not even title to the land underneath it.
When Hurricane Maria came, Pena’s home of 22 years was battered. The roof blew off and wind-driven rain poured into the interior for hours, soaking her clothes, her bed and other belongings. It flowed downstairs to her kitchen, where the water ruined her pressed-wood cabinets and the new stove and oven on which she cooked big meals to supplement her retirement income. Then came the flooding, because the community was built on former wetlands bordering a mangrove canal where water no longer flows because of heavy sedimentation and the accumulation of years of illegally dumped trash.
In Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory with an official poverty rate of 44 percent, such “informal” home construction has for generations been more the rule than the exception, in particular in towns and rural areas outside San Juan, but also in extensive stretches of the capital city. That is one reason Hurricane Maria caused such widespread destruction as it blew across the length and breadth of the island Sept. 20.
Now, even as the island’s electric-power agency struggles to restore service to thousands of households still without it, authorities are starting to grapple with a post-Maria housing crisis of such daunting dimensions and complexity that it’s bound to haunt Puerto Rico long after the last power line is reconnected.
The island’s building codes are, on paper at least, the equal of Florida’s vaunted windstorm rules. But enforcement is wildly uneven, industry insiders say. Subjected to permit-and-inspection regimes, condo towers and extensive subdivisions for the upper-middle class that sprawl out for miles from San Juan’s urban core fared well under Maria’s punishing winds, sustaining mostly minor damage.
But as much as half the housing on the island was built without permits, Puerto Rico government officials say. No one knows precisely how much of that there is, but the government’s housing secretary said it could be as much as the roughly 1 one million legal dwellings on the island.
It’s that informal construction that bore the brunt of Maria’s fury, said Housing Secretary Fernando Gil. There’s no full tally yet, but the numbers so far are high: 250,000 homes with major damage, 70,000 of those destroyed. By the time inspections are concluded, Gil estimated, as many as 300,000 dwellings will be determined to have been significantly damaged.
The president of the Puerto Rico Builders Association, architect Ricardo Alvarez-Diaz, said estimates put the need for new dwellings at a range of 60,000 to 90,000 units in the next five years, depending on how many island residents move to the mainland.
To rebuild the island’s housing stock will cost $31 billion, the administration of Gov. Ricardo Rossello estimates, or nearly twice the amount needed to rebuild its devastated electric grid. Because the commonwealth government is broke and owners of informal housing are typically poor and have neither insurance nor money to rebuild, virtually every penny would have to come from the U.S. government. The Federal Emergency Management Agency expects the Maria recovery effort to be the largest it’s ever undertaken.
Reconstruction, though, won’t be a straightforward job even if the dollars are forthcoming.
Repairing or rebuilding illegally erected dwellings to meet building codes is difficult, if not impossible. Many such homes are in flood zones or unstable hillsides where rebuilding may not be allowed. And because many informally built communities originated in invasions of public or private land by squatters—often abetted by local politicians and grandfathered in—residents often have no titles to their lots, which means FEMA cannot pay for repairs, though it can help them move.
That raises the unwelcome specter of mass uprooting of established communities, a possibility the government has yet to broach publicly but that residents and leaders of many informal neighborhoods and their supporters are already urging against.
Gil, echoing building-industry leaders and many other island residents, said Puerto Rico can’t afford to continue tolerating or blessing illegal construction on a large scale. “We’re in the door to Hurricane Alley,” Gil said. “We need to rethink the way we used to do things. Everybody has the responsibility of not letting that happen again.”
But the practical obstacles to enforcing a building-code regimen are immense, Gil and others acknowledge. Some skeptics believe there’s little the island’s state and local governments can do to curb the widespread practice of informal construction, much less eliminate it.
For one thing, people whose homes have been damaged won’t wait, maybe for years, for government help. Many began rebuilding soon after the storm, salvaging materials or buying inexpensive plywood and zinc at the hardware store to put their homes back together. Most poor Puerto Ricans are unlikely to pay architects or engineers to draw up plans, or absorb the costs of permits or better building materials required to meet code.
Moreover, some advocates for residents of informal communities contend it’s unfair to hold them to the letter of building regulations when government officials have at times allowed developers to build in hazardous flood zones or approved construction of substandard quality.
“There is no way that people will sit and wait in houses without a roof for a government program to come and maybe repair the roof,” said Lyvia Rodriguez, executive director of Enlace, an umbrella corporation that links Cano Martin Pena community organizations, known collectively as G8 for the number of communities involved. “Self-construction will happen, and is happening.”
Within days of Maria’s passage, G8 leader Jose Caraballo Pagan said, he had already nailed a new zinc roof on his home in the Barrio Obrero Marina community. He said he built his two-story home—like Pena’s a wooden second story atop a concrete first floor—to replace a house his father erected in 1963 when his family first settled in.
Rodriguez advocates a middle way, in which organizations like hers or government agencies pay architects to help residents gradually upgrade their homes, while new homes in the communities are affordably built to code. A community land trust that now owns much of the land in the G8 communities has already built two of permitted solar-powered prototype houses.
If anchored properly, Rodriguez said, zinc roofs on wooden rafters can survive a strong storm. Several century-old wood-frame homes with zinc roofs in the nearby historic district of Miramar, for example, escaped Maria with only minor damage.
Many, however, did not. Of 4,000 homes in the G8 communities, she said, 800 homes lost their roofs and 75 were a total loss and will be demolished. The well-organized, well-connected coalition was able to move quickly to temporarily replace lost roofs with blue tarps from FEMA.
But long-term prospects are highly uncertain.
Maria exposed a badly hidden reality on the island: Puerto Rico is a sharply unequal society. Much of its population is dirt-poor by U.S. mainland standards and living in hazardous housing of appalling quality, sometimes in isolated pockets. Illegal housing construction to the extent found on the island would not be tolerated on the mainland, critics say.
Hurricane Maria dismantled nearly every one of 130 homes in Villa Esperanza, founded seven years ago when a group of locals desperate for affordable places to live took over a former sugarcane field owned by the island’s land authority. The community organized, fending off efforts to evict them and eventually reaching a five-year lease agreement with the government under which each family pays $35 rent a month. Electrical power is “borrowed,” one community leader acknowledged euphemistically.
Maria’s winds sent a tornado through the community, residents said. Just 60 families remain, but they’re determined to stay. Some have already begun rebuilding their fallen houses.
But residents are increasingly desperate, saying FEMA workers have told them they won’t pay to rebuild because the homes can’t meet code. In the meantime, they’re depending on churches and charities for water and food.