By Esther Alaejos
SAN JUAN – Puerto Rican Jerome Zayas has moved twice in the last five years, with his 12-year-old son Ayan, due to gentrification and the rise of short-term rentals in Puerto Rico, forcing its inhabitants to move neighborhood and even to leave the island.
His ordeal is not over. Zayas tells EFE that now they have once again been forced to move from a 1930s building located in Puerta de Tierra, in San Juan, which they “love” but which is already “practically empty” and faces “a lot of speculation.”
At 33 years old, he is going through his third move from communities in San Juan where humble families traditionally lived: La Perla and Puerta de Tierra, both bordering the touristy Old San Juan.
The young man denounces that this scourge is also eliminating essential services in communities such as schools, care centers, supermarkets and common spaces.
Like Zayas, Elliot Tray, 32, has been forced to search for a new home twice in recent times.
The first time, they cut off her water and electricity supplies and gave her 24 hours to leave her home in the Santurce neighborhood, and now she is going through her second displacement, this time from the Río Piedras metropolitan area.
controversial legislation
“There are no laws that protect tenants, the law is pro-property,” complains the New Yorker, who has lived in Puerto Rico for three years, his family’s home island.
In Río Piedras, the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) denounced a few months ago that beneficiaries, mostly Americans, of Law 22 are hoarding properties in the urban area of this neighborhood, where many students, workers and immigrants live.
Law 22, known as the Individual Tax Incentives Law, offers full tax exemption for dividends, interest and capital gains to investors who settle in Puerto Rico for at least 183 days a year.
Residents of one of the Río Piedras buildings acquired by a beneficiary of this law raised their voices after the new owner of the property imposed a rent increase of $1,000 dollars per month.
Between 2014 and 2020, housing prices in Puerto Rico increased by 23% and the median rental increased by 7%, while the percentage of short-term rentals increased by 10%, according to the latest report from the Center for the New Economy (CNE).
citizen mobilization
Given the inaction of the authorities to regulate access to housing, organizations such as the Feminist Collective, Legal Aid and community leaders try to address this problem by creating awareness.
“Displacement is the reality of the people who live in Puerto Rico, where between 12 and 17% of the population has left in the last 10 years and, many times, that decision to leave has nothing to do with their will. nor with encouragement, it has more to do with the impossibility of living on the island, ”the executive director of Legal Aid, Adriana Godó, laments to EFE.
The Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics (IEPR) reported last March that, in a period of two years -2020 to 2022-, the island suffered a 2% reduction in its population, estimated at 64,000 inhabitants.
“You have to try to create awareness, local initiatives and resist,” emphasize Manny Vázquez and Lourdes Díaz, both creators of community projects to unite residents who do not want to leave the Caribbean island where they were born.
“People live here”
Jesús Cruz Negrón is the vice president of the Puerta de Tierra Brigade Group, a community-based art group that began to mobilize in Puerta de Tierra in 2015 under the slogan “Here people live.”
“The transformation process has been very fast, no one expected that in less than two years the neighborhood would have changed from a neighborhood of residents who were born here, to a tourist neighborhood,” the community leader told EFE from one of the residential traditionally low-income who are suffering from skyrocketing rents.
The slogan “Here people live” was used by the Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny, who echoed this problem in his documentary on his theme “El Apagón”, published in 2022.
Negrón appreciates this support but requests more long-term commitment to the community: “Unfortunately they arrived, made their video and have not returned.”
In order not to fall into oblivion, the activist is organizing the “Intramurales” project, which through the fusion of urban art and sport aims to claim access to decent housing.
Keep reading:
Puerto Rico lost 2% of its population between 2020 and 2022
Nydia Velázquez joins organizations in the US that seek to stop the displacement of Puerto Ricans by foreign “investors” with tax exemptions under Law 22
Democratic representatives in Congress ask the comptroller general to investigate the fiscal impact in Puerto Rico of tax decrees to foreigners under Law 22