Op-ed: Housing Crisis Part I: Lack of Affordable Housing Has Economic Consequences

Born white in America in 1949 I grew up assuming that everyone had the privilege of if not homeownership at least a solid roof over their head. Back then, there was probably some truth to it. Not anymore. The unthinkable income disparity that has crept into everyone’s reality in my lifetime is playing out in a way that is becoming disastrous for the Virgin Islands. I hope this three-part series will awaken our community and our leadership to the desperate need to address this crisis now.

An article in one of my news feeds caught my eye recently with the following quote from Shannon Van Zant, professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University: “Disasters can wipe out affordable housing for years unless communities plan ahead – the loss hurts the entire local economy.”

I have been acquainted over the years with young people who had come home to try and build a life in the place they were born. All of them were suffering from the same problem. The wages they were able to make here in the Virgin Islands were not enough to cover the cost of living, particularly the cost of housing. It was depressing to watch them, one by one, give up and go back to the U.S. mainland or elsewhere.

That was before our last major natural disasters that occurred back-to-back in 2017. Rebuilding has been frustratingly slow. Nearly five years after hurricanes Irma and Maria blew our roofs off and houses down, only a smattering have been repaired enough to be livable. Information on how many and how much is almost impossible to ascertain. In fairness to the territory, it took almost three years for the mountains of paperwork required to obtain federal disaster funds to be completed.

Meanwhile, in a conversation recently with one of the housing officials in the territory, I was told there were as many as 9,000 people on a waiting list for affordable housing – 3,000 of which will be satisfied when the projects being rebuilt are finished. That still leaves 6,000 people without a living space to call their own; that is after thousands of people abandoned the territory in the wake of the 2017 devastation.

The unforeseen double whammy that the Virgin Islands experienced two-and-a-half years after Irma and Maria flattened or seriously damaged homes across the territory was COVID.

With borders closed across the Caribbean, scantily clad tourists flocked by the thousands to our shores on historically cheap airfares. The United States Virgin Islands was one of the few places whose borders remained open. We had no choice as a U.S. territory but to accept them at any cost.

Throughout the onslaught, several major hotels remained closed – and continue to be closed – due to the severe damage caused by the storms coupled with bureaucratic bungling and, in some cases, the second part of our dilemma, the lack of construction workers needed to rebuild.

An example is that at one point, workers were actually housed in the dilapidated structures they were brought in to reconstruct.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the contract games that are rampant in our community which always slows progress while the underbelly of our society finagles a way to dip into the pot of federal gold.

Meanwhile, landlords seeing the influx of these overnight guests as their own gold mine too good to pass up, began evicting long-term tenants in order to make room for the overnighters. They could double, if not triple, their income with short-term rentals. The immigration included federal employees overseeing the disaster recovery who were able to pay exorbitant nightly fees – again on the federal dollar – to secure housing (with air-conditioning) across the islands.

Meanwhile, much more recently, Virgin Islanders wanting to return home to escape the various situations on the mainland that exacerbated the potential for contracting COVID had no place to go unless they were fortunate enough to have family with empty apartments. These were also highly qualified young people who longed to come home to find meaningful work or to continue working virtually in the jobs they had held elsewhere.