Shelter from the Storm: Puerto Rico’s Uninsured Homeowners Face an Uphill Battle to Rebuild in the Aftermath of Hurricane Maria

When Hurricane Maria’s Category 4+ winds slammed into Puerto Rico last September, they exposed serious issues with the island territory’s infrastructure that go beyond providing water and electricity. For both economic and cultural reasons, Puerto Rico is woefully underinsured, leaving many homeowners without adequate funding to rebuild their shattered homes and dependent on a bankrupt territorial government on the one hand, and a federal government that seems, at best, reluctant to offer its full assistance on the other.

One of the biggest obstacles to rebuilding Puerto Rico is that as many as half of the island’s homes do not have insurance, while less than 1% of properties are covered by federal flood insurance. While speaking with students in the University at Buffalo School of Law’s Puerto Rico Recovery Assistance Legal Clinic, insurance expert Ariel Rivera said that because of this lack of coverage, only 720 insurance claims related to Hurricane Maria had been submitted by residents of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands as of January 5th, 2018, resulting in over $1.3 million in advance payments. These numbers stand in stark contrast to the over 32,000 claims Mr. Rivera says were submitted by U.S. citizens over the same time period, and the over $134 million in advance payments survivors received in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, which made landfall in Florida only weeks before Maria hit Puerto Rico.

The lack of insurance coverage in Puerto Rico is due in part to the island’s struggling economy, as nearly half of the population was already living below the poverty line before Hurricane Maria hit. However, Mr. Rivera also said that Puerto Rico’s tight-knit family structure and decades of lax building code enforcement at the local level had allowed unregulated construction to flourish, and now more than half of the homes in Puerto Rico are illegally constructed.

Tragically, families living in these homes, often for generations, could not have purchased insurance prior to Maria even if they had the means to do so because their homes were built without the permits from their local municipalities, and were not constructed in accordance with applicable building codes. Without insurance, these families will be forced to rely on the government or charitable organizations to repair or rebuild their homes, making disaster relief from FEMA even more imperative. Unfortunately, our students have seen firsthand the difficulties faced by their fellow citizens who have had claims denied by FEMA or received offers of $1,000 in assistance to rebuild homes that one survivor described as “a complete loss.”

Moving forward, HUD Secretary Ben Carson has “promised to break through entrenched government policies to put people on the path to self-sufficiency,” telling Politico, “We do recognize that the situation is different here than it is in Texas or Florida . . . We want to look at the goals, not the rules.”

For now however, #UBLawResponds student attorneys and staff in the Puerto Rico Recovery Assistance Legal Clinic are busy working alongside organizations like Ayuda Legal Huracan Maria to help survivors appeal unfavorable FEMA decisions, and to provide humanitarian assistance to those who have remained without power and potable water for the past four months. I am proud to be part of this amazing group supporting the work of faculty and students as a librarian; we are working as hard as we can to help our fellow citizens rebuild their homes and lives. You can support our ongoing efforts here.