Temporary Housing,Permanent Communities

A colony of the United States since 1898, in 1951 Puerto Rico became an Estado Libre Asociado (Free Associated State), or Commonwealth of the United States. For a discussion of Muñoz's plans for economic and social development in the island and the adequate political status to accompany those goals, see Francisco A. Catalá Oliveras, “Guerra, Dorfman y la Realidad Práctica de Muñoz,” in Fernando Picó, ed., Luis Muñoz Marín, Perfiles de su Gobernación, 1948–1964 (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín, 2003), 209–27. For a description on where the economic-development program of Operation Bootstrap got its name, see David F. Ross, “Gordon Lewis on Puerto Rico's Development Program,” The Journal of Politics 19 (1957): 86–100. For a description of Operation Bootstrap and the plan, see R. Carr, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment (New York: New York University Press, 1984). For a description of the social and economic goals of the economic plan of the island, see Rafael Picó, “The Role of Planning in Puerto Rico,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 285 (1953): 70–75. For a description of the policy and planning programs developed in this era, see Gordon K. Lewis, “Puerto Rico: A Case-Study in an Underdeveloped Area,” The Journal of Politics 17 (1955): 614–40.

Francisco A. Catalá Oliveras reports that six goals were central to the plan called “Propósito de Puerto Rico” [Purpose of Puerto Rico] presented by Muñoz Marín to the Congress in 1964. The third goal is to provide each Puerto Rican family its own home. Catalá Oliveras, “Guerra,” 217-217.

Oscar Lewis , La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty (San Juan and New York: Random House, 1965).

See Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio , The Fall (and Rise) of Public Housing (Join Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University, 2000). The authors look at Hope VI specifically and display how this policy, too, was devised with the purpose of “helping tenants move up out of poverty.”

Juanita Greene , “Puerto Rico,” The Miami Herald Sunday Magazine, November 19, 1961, 28-28; Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín Archives, Datos Sobre Vivienda, Sección 5, Serie 16#10, Caja 4.

Puerto Rico's “on the move” aura of the 1950s has been captured by a range of academic and nonacademic texts. While the “move” I explicitly refer to is one of economic development, the focus on housing signals other types of moves—migrations to urban centers and immigration to the United States. Thus, social and economic development in Puerto Rico was intimately linked to migration and immigration. This connection between migration and development is evident in many Puerto Rican works, including La Carreta, which describes the migration of a family from a rural area in Puerto Rico, to a slum in an urban center, to New York City: René Marqués, La Carreta: Drama en Tres Actos (Río Piedras: Cultural, 1983). This similar path is followed by the family that is the subject of Oscar Lewis's work, La Vida. West Side Story's plot of migration from Puerto Rico to the big city is also in the tradition of these stories. Jorge Duany's work also signals to Puerto Rico's fleeting identity as it is constantly in flux: Jorge Duany, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities in the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

I conducted focus groups in two public housing sites in the city of Ponce in Puerto Rico between October 2003 and February 2004. The data presented here come from these research efforts.

For confidentiality concerns, all names of informants have been changed.

All interviews with residents were conducted in Spanish. All quotes presented in this text in English have been translated from Spanish by the author.

See David Harvey , “Social Justice, Postmodernism, and the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 16 (1992): 588–601. Also see David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001).

In Latin America, latifundia refers to a large, landed estate, and typically, there are peasant workers working these estates. See Departamento de la Vivienda, Vivienda: Metas, Objetivos y Programas (San Juan: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, 1990), at Biblioteca Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico. Also, for a discussion of the complex and colorful story of land redistribution in Puerto Rico, see Rubén Nazario Velasco, “Pan, Casa, Libertad: De la Reforma Agrarian a la Especulación Inmobilaria,” in Fernando Picó, ed., Luis Muñoz Marín, Perfiles de su Gobernación, 1948–1964 (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín, 2003), 144–64.

The laws of 1906 and 1920 sanctioned governmental entities to acquire land for individual families. The 1906 law authorized municipalities to acquire rural parcels to construct villages for their residents. Law #26 of 1920 authorized the Commissioner of Interior to acquire land to construct homes for families that had yearly incomes of less than two thousand dollars.

The Hogar Seguro de Puerto Rico law, or Law #53, was established July 11, 1923.

Four hundred ninety-one dwelling units were built in the Barrio Obrero of Santurce, and 183 units were constructed in the Barrio Obrero of Arecibo. Consult Telesforo Carrero, Housing in Puerto Rico (Santurce, Puerto Rico: Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico, 1950), at Biblioteca Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico.

The commission had the power to rent or sell the lots and houses in these worker districts; Carrero, Housing in Puerto Rico.

Luz Marie Rodríguez , “Suppressing the Slum! Architecture and Social Change in San Juan's Public Housing,” in Enrique Vivoni Falagio , ed., San Juan Siempre Nuevo: Arquitecturay Modernización en el Siglo XX (Río Piedras: Archivo de Arquitectura y Construcción Universidad de Puerto Rico [AACUPR], 2000), 74–117.

The PRERA was established in 1934 as part of the New Deal programs. On May 28, 1935, the PRERA was substituted by the PRRA, under a more expansive jurisdiction and a more directed focus on developing the socioeconomic infrastructure. In Rodríguez, “Suppressing the Slum,” 86.

Carrero , Housing in Puerto Rico.

Rodríguez, “Suppressing the Slum,” 74–117.

Charles Fourier (1772–1837) was a French philosopher and sociologist who advocated a system of interaction in which individuals lived in falansterios—organized human collectives with the objective of promoting the well-being of each of their members through free labor. For a detailed account of the debate that led to the name El Falansterio and the introduction of the name by the press, see Rodríguez, “Suppressing the Slum,” 74–117.

My emphasis; citing a newspaper in Rodríguez, “Suppressing the Slum,” 97.

It is interesting to note that although the Falansterio units were originally rented for eight dollars a month, the buildings became a cooperative in 1948. The tenants of these buildings, who paid a minimum of eight dollars per month in rent, formed a cooperative and began buying their units. Tenants with more than five years' residence in the project and who satisfied certain criteria such as having “good moral conduct” qualified for title of the property. In Carrero, Housing in Puerto Rico.

The other projects built by the PRRA included (1) Barriada Hoare in Santurce, built in 1935 and consisting of 250 detached frame dwellings. These houses were granted free to qualifying families; (2) Mirapalmeras in Santurce, a multiple-dwelling development built between 1936 and 1937, consisting of 131 concrete units in one-story row houses. The units were sold to qualifying tenants; (3) La Granja in Caguas, a multiple-dwelling development consisting of seventy-eight concrete units and sold to qualifying tenants; (4) Eleanor Roosevelt in Hato Rey, built between 1936 and 1938 and consisting of 635 detached concrete units, sold to qualifying tenants; and (5) Morell Campos in Ponce, built between 1936 and 1938, consisting of 150 concrete detached units. See Carrero, Housing in Puerto Rico.

The Puerto Rican Housing Authority was established by Law #126 of May 6, 1938. The law initiated the U.S. federal public housing program in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898, following the Spanish-American War. The status of Puerto Rico as a territory made the island subject to U.S. federal law and eligible for federal U.S. funds. This propelled the local housing authorities. For a discussion of the local mobilization that took place to establish the local authorities in the island, see K. W. Back, Slums, Projects, and People: Social Psychological Problems of Relocation in Puerto Rico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1962). By 1950, the Río Piedras and Arecibo housing authorities had folded into the Puerto Rican Housing Authority, leaving the Mayagüez, San Juan, and Ponce authorities and the Puerto Rican Housing Authority to represent the other municipalities of the island.

Repositories for the massive urban migrations of the turn of the century, the slums of Puerto Rico were an increasing preoccupation among locals and U.S. visitors. The government of Puerto Rico saw the slums as irremediable communities. Puerto Rico's planning board felt that the high densities, the disorganized layout, the undesirable topographic conditions, and the lack of sanitary infrastructure prevented any type of improvement to the slums and ultimately doomed them to be permanently cleared. See Carrero, Housing in Puerto Rico. For a description of the slum conditions in Puerto Rico, see Helen Icken Safa, The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974). Also see Rodríguez, “Suppressing the Slum,” 74–117.

Law #64 of May 14, 1945, gave the planning board the power to declare any run-down urban sector a slum and to label it “M,” meaning “para mejorarse,” or “to be improved.” Consult Departamento de la Vivienda, Vivienda.

Departamento de la Vivienda, Vivienda.

See Puerto Rico Housing Authority, Housing Progress in Puerto Rico, 1938–1948 (San Juan: Puerto Rican Housing Authority, 1948), 4. Also see Carrero, Housing in Puerto Rico.

Carrero , Housing in Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico Housing Authority , Housing Progress in Puerto Rico, 4-4.

The ARUV and CRUV also integrated other Puerto Rican social agencies such as the Health Department and the Administration of Social Programs. See Archivo Municipio de Ponce, Corporación de Renovación Urbana y Vivienda, Administractión de Renovación Urbana y Vivienda, Banco de la Vivienda, Memorial Explicativo: Creación Administración de la Vivienda (San Juan, 1967), unclassified document.

After the 1970s, the story of the CRUV and the Puerto Rican housing agencies was far from glorious. The agencies faced financial and managerial challenges that continued through to the start of the new millennium.

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín Archives, author unkown, La Filosofía del Gobierno de Puerto Rico y los Programas de la CRUV (unknown date), Datos Sobre Vivienda, Sección 5, Serie 16 #10, Caja 4. Original in Spanish; author's translation.

Lewis , “Puerto Rico,” 614–650.

For a discussion on how the 1941 Ley de Tierras regulation paved the way for individual housing lots and a suburban reorganization of space, see Velasco, “Pan, Casa, Libertad,” 144–64.

Sepúlveda Rivera investigates Muñoz's role in the urban environment, and specifically, his connection with the real estate developer responsible for creating the first mass-housing development in Puerto Nuevo. This developer's urbanización became the model for the suburban type of housing developments that characterizes the island to this day. Anibal Sepúlveda Rivera, “Viejos Cañaverales, Casa Nuevas: Muñoz versus el Síndrome Long,” in Fernando Picó, ed., Luis Muñoz Marín, Perfiles de su Gobernación, 1948–1964 (San Juan, Puerto Ricco: Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín, 2003), 166–207.

Sepúlveda Rivera demonstrates how the interest in private investment in the island in the area of housing led to the participation of Long in the island. Sepúlveda Rivera, “Viejos Cañaverales,” 166–207. Also, Luz Marie Rodríguez argues that Puerto Rico's interest in clearing the slums was guided by the island's hope of becoming a hot tourist destination for U.S. Americans; Rodríguez, “Suppressing the Slum,” 74–117.

Corporación de Renovación Urbana y Vivienda, Administractión de Renovación Urbana y Vivienda, Banco de la Vivienda, Memorial Explicativo, 1. Originally in Spanish; author's translation.

Safa, Urban Poor of Puerto Rico; and Rodriguez, “Suppressing the Slum,” 74–117. Also see Back, Slums, Projects, and People; and Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín Archives, Ernesto Juan Fonfrias, “De Arrabales a Hogares,” in Tomo X de la Colección Americana (unkown year), 227–36, Datos Sobre Vivienda, Sección 5, Serie 16 #10, Caja 4.

Some scholars proposed that the resistance was a reaction to development practices that continually destroyed and displaced slum-dwelling communities and that the multiple-dwelling architecture of public housing was not palatable to Puerto Ricans. For examples of these arguments, see Safa, Urban Poor of Puerto Rico; Lewis, La Vida; and Back, Slums, Projects, and People.

Carlos Alvarado , “Public Housing in Puerto Rico: Housing for a Lower Segment, a Special Case,” in J. S. Fuerst , ed., Public Housing in Europe and America (New York and Toronto: Halsted and John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 167–177.

Gordon K. Lewis suggested that to further the sought-after economic development, Muñoz went along with programs that provided most federal investments. See Lewis, “Puerto Rico.”

It is impossible for me to say with certainty when the term transitory and the idea of public housing as temporary are born in the Puerto Rican housing program. With the emergence of the CRUV in the 1950s and its role as the first self-conscious housing agency of the island, the number of documents pertaining to the public housing program in Puerto Rico increases. It is possible that before the CRUV, public housing was deemed as transitory, and in fact, I would argue that it was. This discussion, however, is beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, this article underscores the emergence of an explicitly stated ideology regarding Puerto Rican public housing. The ideology of public housing in Puerto Rico as transitory appears in government documents beginning in the late 1940s. This represents a first step in building the historiography of the ideology of public housing in Puerto Rico.

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín Archives, minutes from Reunión Sobre Programas de Gobierno (Vivienda), 15 y 18 de julio de 1963, Datos Sobre Vivienda, Sección 5, Serie 16 #10, Caja 4. Original in Spanish; author's translation.

The remaining three mandates were (1) that slums should be rehabilitated in their place when the environmental conditions justified it, and slums that were not susceptible to improvements in their place would be cleared; (2) that when being resettled, the families displaced because of slum redevelopment should be able to freely choose between different housing options; and (3) that the CRUV should coordinate and encourage the construction of low-cost housing through a variety of strategies and provide financing especially for the construction, reconstruction, and improvements of housing. In Archivo Municipio de Ponce, Corporación de Renovación Urbana y Vivienda de Puerto Rico, Propuesto Programa de Vivienda Urbana a Bajo Costo para Familias de ingresos moderados (1963), unclassified document.

The origin of the term caserío is in the rural farmland. Caseríos are defined as “conjunto de casas en el campo” (group of houses in rural farmland), while residencial is an adjective referring to personal housing; Ramon García-Pelayo y Gross, Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado (Paris: Ediciones Larousse, 1976). It is not hard to see from the origins of the word how one would be preferred to others. Typically in Puerto Rico, since the era of privileged development in the 1950s, anything that is from the farmland is considered backward compared to the urban areas. Today, depending on the interlocutor and other contextual elements, caserío is sometimes equivalent to calling a public housing site a “ghetto,” whereas residencial is a more accepted (politically correct) term, especially for those who reside outside of these neighborhoods.

Disagreements regarding the proper label for public housing continue through the present. My dissertation research explores the different labels used to describe public housing, how the labels used vary across communities, and what the signification of the terms is according to the contextual factors existent when using the terms.

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín Archives, Memorandum de Luis Muñoz Marín a T. Carrero (Julio 14, 1954), Datos Sobre Vivienda, Sección 5, Serie 16 #10, Caja 4. Original in Spanish; author's translation.

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín Archives, Corporación de Renovación Urbana, Informe Semanal Número 25 (24 de junio de 1964), Datos Sobre Vivienda, Sección 5, Serie 16 #10, Caja 4. Original in Spanish; author's translation.

Alvarado , “Public Housing in Puerto Rico,” 167–177.

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín Archives, La Filosofía del Gobierno de Puerto Rico y los Programas de la CRUV (author and date unknown), Datos Sobre Vivienda, Sección 5, Serie 16 # 10, Caja 4. Original in Spanish; author's translation.

Alvarado , “Public Housing in Puerto Rico,” 172-172.

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín Archives, letter from Luis Muñoz Marín to Srta. Ingrid M. Silva of Villa Dos Pinos in Río Piedras, May 25, 1954, Datos Sobre Vivienda, Sección 5, Serie 16 #10, Caja 4. Original in Spanish; author's translation.

Sepúlveda Rivera, “Viejos Cañaverales,” describes in detail the debate between Long and Muñoz Marín.

Sepúlveda Rivera, “Viejos Cañaverales.”

Sepúlveda Rivera, “Viejos Cañaverales.”

Alvarado , “Public Housing in Puerto Rico,” 172-172.

Alvarado , “Public Housing in Puerto Rico,” 173-173.

Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín Archives, Borrador Aspectos de Vivienda para Discurso de Despedida del Gobernador Muñoz Marín, 7 de diciembre de 1964, Datos Sobre Vivienda, Sección 5, Serie 16 #10, Caja 4. Original in Spanish; author's translation.

Borrador Aspectos de Vivienda para Discurso de Despedida del Gobernador Muñoz Marín. Original in Spanish; author's translation.

The question of whether and how much “choice” poor people have in choosing their housing is unavoidable at this point. In this article, I assume that residents of public housing have, like all agents, a range of options from which to choose. The range of options, granted, varies for individuals and for social groups. In this instance, I focus on the word choice to move beyond an exclusive economically deterministic understanding of residential choice. I implicitly suggest that in the same way that people with higher economic means choose their residences based on more than economic concerns (proximity to job, good “family” neighborhood, racial preferences), poor people also have a range of considerations when living in a residential area. While families that live in Puerto Rican public housing may have economic restrictions that limit their residence to public housing, I suggest that there are noneconomic community attachments that affect the choice of families to stay in the public housing communities.

I have chosen to present the narratives of the interviewers in collapsed groupings to display that these voices are the voices of communities instead of individuals. I conducted focus-group interviews, which are more effective for discovering the discourse of a group of people. Presenting these voices individually would suggest that I am interested in the individuals that make up the communities. Instead, I am interested in the communities as a collective and how the voices come together to profile the communities. Thus, these narratives are presented not in their individual qualities but for how they reflect the collective expressions of two public housing communities. All interviews were conducted in Spanish and translated by the author.

Michel De Certeau , The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), has shown how places are a combination of physical space and social meaning. Rowe, applying De Certeau's concept of place, states that “people create spaces through social processes and thus convert space into place.” P. G. Rowe, Civic Realism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 212.

Gerald D. Suttles , The Social Construction of Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

For a description of how working African American single women develop kin networks for their children, see Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

Jane Jacobs , The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961).

Dolores Hayden , “The Power of Place,” Journal of Urban History 20 (1994): 466–485.

Glenn C. Loury , The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

The urban-renewal policies of the 1950s and 1960s, popularly renamed Negro Removal, have come to be infamously known as policies seeking to rearrange the racial and socioeconomic spatial order of neighborhoods. The modernist architecture consisting of super-blocks of high-rise buildings applied to the bulk of public housing projects in the United States has been dismissed as inadequate and conducive to criminality and blight among the spaces inhabited by the poor. Note Peter G. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell Hall, 1988), 207.

Dolores Hayden , Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984). Hayden describes how the American dream has continued to uphold an antiqued traditional view of the home. Hayden demonstrates that the single-family Victorian home continues to be the dream (of the physical space of the house as well as lifestyle) in the face of a changing economy that challenges society to find alternative ideals for housing. She advocates a redesigning of the American dream through spatial, architectural, infrastructural (transportation), and programmatic (political, cultural movements) interventions that reshape all citizens' (regardless of gender) relationship to public space and to housing.

This idea of eventual autonomy was also something that made the ELA more palatable to Puerto Ricans and resulted in the overwhelming support for Muñoz's party, the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) de Puerto Rico.

See Steven Gregory , Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). For an alternative account of poor communities in the United States, also see Alford Young, The Minds of Marginalized Black Men (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

See Safa, Urban Poor of Puerto Rico; and Gerald D. Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).