Resilient Housing and Communities

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Recovery & Resilience in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands
Find out more about the briefings in this series below:
June 2	Federal Support and Local Action
June 3	Resilient Housing and Communities
June 4	Sustainable, Democratic Energy and Public Health

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) held a series of one-hour online briefings about resilience initiatives in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands and their ongoing recovery from back-to-back natural disasters over the last several years. Every U.S. coast is facing climate adaptation challenges due to rising sea levels and other coastal hazards, but island economies are especially vulnerable. The Fourth National Climate Assessment points to the small size and relative isolation of the U.S. Caribbean islands (including Puerto Rico, Vieques, Culebra, St. Croix, St. Thomas, St. John, and Water Island), which means their “social, economic, and ecological systems are likely to be more sensitive to changes in temperature and precipitation than similar systems in the mainland United States.”

After Hurricane Maria’s devastating impact on Puerto Rico in 2017, many communities looked within to build their own power (literally and figuratively) and a more sustainable future. In this panel, Arturo A. Massol-Deyá, Executive Director of Casa Pueblo de Adjuntas, and faculty member in the Department of Biology at the University of Puerto Rico, discussed how the community-based group of Casa Pueblo is becoming a model of self-sufficiency with residential solar energy. Laurie Schoeman, National Director, Resilience and Disaster Recovery for Enterprise Community Partners, discussed her work with local partners in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to design housing and community centers that can face the social, economic, and environmental challenges of a changing climate, including the “Resilient Community Center” guide and “Keep Safe, A Guide for Resilient Housing Design in Island Communities."

 

HIGHLIGHTS

Laurie Schoeman, National Director, Resilience and Disaster Recovery, Enterprise Community Partners

• Enterprise Community Partners is a national organization that helps low- and moderate-income people and communities build resilient, safe, and affordable housing.
• Enterprise has been working on disaster recovery and resilience since Hurricane Katrina damaged 800,000 homes in 2005. Affordable housing is often the most vulnerable because communities have few resources to invest in home maintenance and fortification.
• The United States is experiencing an affordable housing crisis. In a majority of states, 10-15 percent of households face housing insecurity, and housing is often unsafe. Island communities facing housing insecurity are subject to additional climate threats.
  • The housing crisis has intersected with the COVID-19 crisis, since many do not have a home to shelter in place in. There are insufficient shelters to deal with the dual impact of COVID-19 and natural disasters, especially since storms contribute to disease spread.
• Housing planning must account for not only the current physical needs of a community, but also its social and psychological needs and the needs of future generations.
• Planners must consider where houses are sited, since many communities with affordable housing are located in floodplains where it is cheaper to build, but where buildings are at greater risk of natural disasters.
• To build climate-resilient island communities, policymakers must:
  • Consider the diversity of community members and community needs.
  • Build prototypes for peer-to-peer learning and sharing.
  • Consider regional and island-wide planning, not just locality planning.
  • Identify ways to leverage weatherization models to ensure that homes are fortified in advance of storms.
  • Consider the importance of the nonprofit sector, particularly community organizations, in implementing resilience strategies.
• Investment in community development is a key component of hazard mitigation, and often provides communities with long-term savings. These investments should advance other community objectives, protect infrastructure and open space, and promote economic resilience.
• Enterprise and Puerto Rico community partners developed the Keep Safe textbook, available in both Spanish and English, as a community-based strategy for resilience and housing adaptation. It details strategies to build in resilience, from the initial identification of risks to the final steps of developing community-wide emergency strategies.
• There are multiple risks that must be considered when designing housing for island communities, such as floods, earthquakes, drought, and extreme heat and precipitation. The Keep Safe book identifies air, land, and water risks and mitigation strategies.
• The Keep Safe project developed designs for a community resilience center, which have been used by the organization Resilient Power Puerto Rico.
• Enterprise is also working with community members in the U.S. Virgin Islands to implement the Keep Safe model.

 

Arturo Massol-Deyá, Executive Director, Casa Pueblo de Adjuntas; Faculty Member, Department of Biology, University of Puerto Rico

• Climate change will make Puerto Rico more vulnerable to storms, droughts, heavy rain events, sea level rise, coral reef damage, reduced crop yields, and reduced marine ecosystem productivity.
• Hurricane Maria [in September 2017] caused a complete power outage on Puerto Rico, and some houses still do not have power. Energy failure caused a reliance on generators, long lines for fuel, difficulty managing fuel costs, and deaths. Fatalities associated with Hurricane Maria occurred because of a failure of the government to provide basic services to the people.
• A 6.5-magnitude earthquake in January 2020 caused another blackout, and it took a week to restore power. But the energy systems set up by Casa Pueblo still had power.
• Immediate challenges facing Puerto Rico are the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 hurricane season, which has been predicted to be severe.
• Casa Pueblo is a community organization in Adjuntas, located in the center of Puerto Rico. It is focused on social transformation, resource conservation, and land protection.
• Casa Pueblo began generating its own solar energy in 1999. After Hurricane Maria, it still had power and served as an energy oasis for community members.
• Resilience is defined as community strength. Strong, self-sufficient communities are better prepared for extreme conditions and have a higher quality of life.
• After Hurricane Maria, Casa Pueblo launched an “energy insurrection”: a bottom-up process to challenge the fossil-fuel-dependent energy setup of the island. The project involves powering critical infrastructure, businesses, schools, and homes with clean energy, and working with universities to generate new knowledge to address community needs.
• Casa Pueblo promotes the goal that 50 percent of total electricity demand in Puerto Rico be generated by solar by 2027. It is first addressing residential consumption, the island’s largest slice of electricity demand, through distributed solar energy systems.
• The initiative to spread solar energy helps promote energy security among low-income families and helps small businesses stay competitive. Homes and businesses that generate their own energy save money, which can be used for other needs.
• Investment in vulnerable places to build community strength, energy independence, and self-sufficiency will make these communities better prepared to address climate change, natural disasters, and economic crises.

 

Q&A Session

 

Are you seeing more government agencies interested in funding pre-disaster adaptation projects that may have higher up-front costs but save money in the long run?

• Schoeman: Investments must be made in adaptation before an event happens. Programs to fund weatherization exist, and more of that funding should go to Puerto Rico. Investments in renewable and distributed energy need to be made across Puerto Rico so both coastal and inland communities have reliable energy. There are opportunities through Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding to resolve these issues, and community organizations need to be brought to the table to inform the process and ensure a ground-up approach is taken.

 

Is Casa Pueblo training young people who are interested in learning more about energy technology?

• Massol-Deyá: There is an opportunity for kids to get training in these kinds of technology, but our organization is not able to do as much as we would like. Energy is an opportunity to address a variety of community needs such as high unemployment and lack of economic activity, so there needs to be more training for young people.

 

Developing models of sustainable communities takes a lot of energy and resources. What shifts in policies would allow community resilience to have wider impacts more quickly, and for these models to take root in more places?

• Massol-Deyá: It is not just Casa Pueblo; other communities in Puerto Rico are doing similar things with conservation and energy. Investments have to go toward building community strength, not make communities more dependent.
• Schoeman: We built the Keep Safe book to provide accessible information for what our community partners identified as resilience-building strategies. We wanted the textbook to encourage local workforce development, so that when funding goes to communities it creates opportunities for the local workforce rather than an outside workforce being introduced and leaving communities without financial resources or the capacity to deal with ongoing events. Our vision is to construct prototypes and use them to model how money can best be used by funders and show that these things can be done. There must also be collaborations between communities to share knowledge.

 

How can natural and nature-based solutions be employed to improve community resilience and mitigate climate risks?

• Massol-Deyá: One of Casa Pueblo’s projects is Bosque Escuela La Olimpia, which is an education program where the curriculum is the forest. Seeing the way the canopy uses solar power through photosynthesis and creates a cooling effect is a way to teach renewable energy and energy efficiency. Teaching the value of biodiversity in forest ecosystems can lead to a valuation of diversity in human communities as well.
• Schoeman: Green building and adaptation have long been promoted in Puerto Rico, especially by Dr. Fernando Abruña. Nature inspired him to become an architect, and he designed houses that can adapt to changing conditions before it became a commonly-known practice. When building things, it is important to consider not only the up-front costs, but also the costs to operate and maintain them.

 

Highlights compiled by Abby Neal