Thank you very much for opening your space to us today, and I just wanted to start talking a little bit concerning the article that you recently published, both in El Nuevo Vieques and also in Claridad regarding the housing situation in Vieques… about your findings, about how you started being concerned about it, and what you found about some research you did…
CATHY GANETT:
Well, the research I did was about my neighborhood. We are standing here in my house in Vieques in Barrio Esperanza, and I moved here a year and a half ago. I actually bought this house a year and a half ago. And I came to Vieques to participate in civil disobedience and to help to get the Navy to stop bombing Vieques, and I decided to stay and bought this house, and I’m renting out an apartment downstairs to tourists.
That was the way that I decided I would be able to live and survive in a community that doesn’t really have much to… too many jobs, and as I’m living here, when the Navy left in May 2003, I was aware that, you know, prices of properties would go up, but I had no idea how much it would go up. It was quite amazing. So, the Navy announced, after the many, many years of protesting of the Viequenses, the Navy announced it would leave on… it started in January 2003. And they said they were leaving on the 1st of May 2003. And so… you know, I’m just going to… I’m not very good at…
So I’ll start on my own, right? OK… I recently published an article about the sales of property in my neighborhood here, where I live, in Esperanza, which is really the neighborhood that has the most tourism in Vieques right now. And because I had been looking for a house to buy a year and a half ago, I pretty much knew what was for sale in this neighborhood and I knew the prices. And it was really quite a shock when the Navy announced that it was going to leave Vieques and stop the bombing in January 2003, that I saw the prices go up. I had bought my house one month before, in December 2002. And pretty much I could have bought any property in the neighborhood that was for sale, that was in price range, but there were very few buyers. I was practically the only buyer looking. And right after I bought my house, and then a month later the Navy announced that they were leaving, the prices started to go up.
And in the last 18 months, from talking to my neighbors and talking to realtors, and from the research that I had done in order to buy my own property, I had found that there were 40 properties sold in this small neighborhood of Esperanza over the course of 18 months. And, again, through talking to people in the neighborhood and observing, I have come to conclude that approximately two out of those 40 buyers are from Vieques, and for me that is absolutely mind-boggling, that only two Viequenses bought.
Now, what I’m making by stating this point is that… what point I’m making is that Viequenses cannot compete in a market that has now become full of buyers from outside, from the United States and from the main island of Puerto Rico. And that we have to address in a public policy way how are Viequenses going to continue to be able to afford to rent and to buy on this island. I looked at the statistics of the houses and found out that approximately 60 or 70 per cent of the 40 buyers were from the United States and maybe about 15 or 20 per cent from Puerto Rico. And, as I say, only two Viequenses bought houses during this period of 18 months, and one bought a business and one bought their home. And, oddly enough, those two did not buy their house through a realtor. I think that says something about the impact of… I’ll say that over again…
And out of those 40 houses that were sold… maybe we should wait until the thunder stops… And out of the 40 properties that were sold in my neighborhood in the last 18 months, that is, since the Navy announced that they were leaving Vieques in January 2003, about 60 to 70 per cent of the buyers were from the United States and about 15 to 20 per cent were from Puerto Rico. And only a small percentage were people who already live in Vieques who were looking to buy a home. That is, as far as I know, only two buyers are from Vieques. And out of those two buyers, one bought a home and one bought a business. And, oddly enough, having talked to all the realtors in Vieques, and not all of them would talk to me, but putting all the information together, I have found out that those two buyers that were from Vieques, did not buy their property through realtors, and I don’t think that is by chance. I think that is saying that the only way Viequenses could afford to buy, was through networking and going directly to the seller.
And I know there are people in this community, as I found out doing the interviews for the article I wrote about this, that believe that the real estate brokers do push the prices up and have a very negative impact upon housing availability in Vieques. Of course, we know that there are other reasons that people are coming to Vieques. We know that they are coming because it’s been written about all over the United States, from The New York Times to the Miami Herald. As soon as the Navy announced that it was leaving in the beginning of 2003, these articles starting to appear, describing Vieques as a “tropical paradise”, as a “nature preserve”, and so forth, never mentioning, of course, that two thirds of the island was formally operated by the U.S. Navy and used for bombing practices, and that it is one of the most contaminated places in the world. And I think that has been a very unbalanced reporting. I think that if the reporting was presented in a more balanced way, presenting the high incidence of illnesses in Vieques, perhaps the buyers wouldn’t be coming here as quickly.
But, at any rate, we have to think about what impact it will have in a tourist area in this neighborhood, having so many buyers buying a home and saving them for a vacation home, meaning that many of them will be vacant for much of the year. I think that they will become very extreme contradictions when we see people unable to find an apartment to rent, and at the same time walking down streets and streets and streets full of houses that are boarded up, while the owners are living in their primary residence in the States.
So, I pose this question, because I think it’s going to be an issue that people who are making public policy and people who are in the community to pressure the people who are making policy will have to address, will have to address providing incentives for people to rent their houses to long-term rentals, and to also perhaps talk about whether we will let entire neighborhoods be bought up by people from the outside. I think these are difficult questions. I think that some of them have been addressed by different reforms that have been… I’m familiar with the reforms from the United States, because I only came here four years ago, such as speculation, taxes, that encourage people not to buy and resell in a short period of time without doing any improvement to the property, and that would be flipping the property. I do know of a couple of instances of flipping in this neighborhood, and although many of the buyers, I think, are going to be very good neighbors, they come here because they like the culture of Puerto Rico, they like the beauty of Vieques, and there are some that will integrate themselves into the community and be good neighbors.
The problem is, in my opinion, is that the vast majority of North Americans who have come to live in Vieques, have not… Wait? No… that the vast majority of North Americans who have come to Vieques to, to live here, either part-time or long-term, tend to congregate among themselves and segregate themselves. And any prejudices that they came here believing about Puerto Ricans and about Vieques are only intensified by the fact that they, that they spend all their time talking to people who look like them. And in the article that I wrote, this issue was brought up several times by the local people. And… that people need to integrate themselves to do volunteer work, they need to, you know, they need to hire Viequenses when they come here to create a business.
There’s a very big problem we have in the business strip down here, in this tourist area, where many of the restaurants will hire English speaking employees over local people who speak Spanish. And, so that if you only have one language, if you are not bilingual… you can pretty much expect to be hired if you speak English, but if you speak just Spanish, no. And that’s clearly a problem, and it’s a problem in terms of how the management relate to their employees as well. So, I think that this problem of Viequenses needing housing cannot be stressed enough, because 60 per cent of the people, families who live in Vieques, are living below the poverty level.
And so, the opportunity to buy a property or even to rent an apartment is very, very difficult. Most of the young families, I believe, are living doubled-up with their parents. They have applied for Section 8, and we have 260 people on the Section 8 waiting list here in Vieques, and we have over 1,000 people waiting for a parcela, a plot of land, to be able to build their own house. And we just have got to see movement, and unfortunately the movement on the part of the government programs has not been sufficient in the recent time. And the land is being bought up, and if it is bought up, there is no going back. Control of the land is control of, I think, the future of Vieques.
PREGUNTA:
Tell me a little bit about the dynamic of when you were collecting the information. Are some other people involved in the business of selling… did you have a good input, output, feedback…? Tell us the…
CATHY GANETT:
Well, in respect to the realtors I interviewed… When I was collecting information for this article, I decided to interview Viequenses and also to interview realtors, and the realtors were difficult to reach, with the exception of, of one in particular. And two of them (no se entiende) that are operating in Vieques refused to talk to me because they said: “Oh, we want to know if you are going to criticize the real estate brokers before we talk to you”. And my article really wasn’t focused on real estate brokers, it was focused on the problem, the need for housing. So, they were very, were not very… respectful in the way they responded to my request to talk with them. And, in fact, one of the realtors that refused to talk to me and was very hostile towards my request, turns out that out of the 40 properties in this neighborhood that were sold, she sold, you know, almost 14 or 15, approaching half of them. So, maybe it’s not odd that she refused to talk about it. She has something to hide. But that kind of makes me think I don’t know what she does.
So, there are realtors that will say, another one that I’m thinking of in particular, will say: “Well, you just don’t understand. This is the effect of supply and demand. We don’t make the prices. The market makes the prices, and we are not doing anything wrong.” Well, I think that that’s clearly not the truth, because I’ve talked to many people who have told me stories, and in the course of doing this story, I’ve interviewed many local people, and one in particular was a woman who has had an approval from a HUD program called “Llave para tu hogar”, which allows her to get a down payment assistance and help with the financing. And she was looking for a long time, maybe a year, I believe. And the landlord where she was living said: “Well, we’ll sell you the house you are living in.” And something happened and he sold the house from under her. One day she found out she had to move. And he said: “I’ll rent you another apartment”, so she moved to the other apartment. And he said: “To make it up to you, if you want to buy this house, you can buy this house”, and she said: “Well, I’m approved for the program, but the program has a limit of 70,000 in terms of the purchase price,” but that if you wait until we are finished paying off one of our debts, that would enable her to afford the house.
She would have more available income. So, one day she was out… she was still waiting for this landlord to get back to her, and she was out and about, and she talked to a realtor who said that he had her house listed and instead of the 85,000 that her landlord had told her, it was listed for 115,000. And that was way above her means, and once again she had been promised. So, somehow, when the realtor intervenes, the prices go up.
Now, here’s the other side of the coin, which I want to be clear about: no one, including myself, would advocate that Viequenses be paid less than what they deserve for their house. So, there’s a delicate balance there, and I think the balance comes out in everybody being truthful and if the seller wants to sell it at a below market price to make it available to a local family, let that be done. I just talked to a woman yesterday who said that she’s selling her house for 60,000 to a person, a relative of hers and it’s under market, she knows it, but she and her husband are going to sell it anyway, under market, without a realtor, but that the realtor approached and said: “You know, I can get you, you know, 100,000 for it,” so there’s a lot of pressure and there are people knocking on doors, buyers, asking if the house is for sale, when there’s no sign on the house, and saying: “I can pay you cash.”
There was a sign down on the Malecón, the restaurants there, this winter, that said: “Cash for your house. Call Steve,” with his phone number. So it’s creating sort of a market frenzy and that is having an effect over, I think… driving the prices up as well. So, as far as what I think can be done about this, because I… I have written a lot about the problem, but I also intend to try to do some kind of summary of what is possible, I think that first of all, we should be negotiating with the real estate brokers, telling them what kind of business practices are expected if they want to do business in Vieques. And, perhaps, some kind of a work order or checklist can be done, characterizing what kind of operation each realtor is.
The problem of the banks I think is a big one. I come from Boston, where there is a very, very famous program, where the hotel workers of all the major Boston hotels have a union, and they negotiated with the banks, so the banks set aside a huge pot of money for first time homebuyers, so that the underwriting standards are not as strict as they can be. And I think we need to examine whether the banks are loaning in an equal manner to local people as they are loaning to people who come from the United States. Whether… it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there was discrimination against local people. Discrimination in Puerto Rico against Puerto Ricans in favor of North Americans, because we know that, unfortunately, white skin privilege is alive and well in the United States and that it carries over into Puerto Rico. Because there isn’t, I don’t think, enough said about discrimination at any point. It needs to be exposed.
So, there are other things that we can do that have to do with creating land banks. Right now, if some Viequenses needed to sell, they could, instead of selling their land to a person coming to buy it as a vacation home, they could sell it to a community non-profit land bank, which could hold the land or the house until there came a time when the resources were available to assist Viequenses to make the purchase of their house.
There are many other programs that I think could be used. And, there are community development corporations, for example. And I think even as supportive as people around the world have been of the Vieques struggle, I think if people were aware that there is right now a real, real struggle for who is going to be in control of the land in Vieques, and whether Viequenses might actually end up losing part of the control, that people might be willing to send donations to buy some of this land or houses, to make a… to preserve housing for Viequenses.
PREGUNTA:
Is this… I know that you have been involved in the housing… in some kind of housing research or worked before… Does this situation remind you of those situations that you found in your previous work with housing?
CATHY GANETT:
Definitely, I have spent many years organizing tenants in Boston, Washington, D.C., and other places in Massachusetts, and I also work in civil rights, particularly around the issue of equal access to public programs, because although Puerto Rico has many disadvantages for the fact that they are under the control of the United States government, I think one tool that could be used to the advantage of people here in Puerto Rico, is… are the federal anti-discrimination laws. And, so… what we could do is housing testing, for example, we could send in two different people to apply to buy or rent the same property and find out what is really happening. This area is ripe for that kind of discrimination and ripe for that kind of early testing. Very often the testing isn’t done until the practices have been going on for years and years.
But I also think the other issue is whether the people who need housing are speaking for themselves, whether they have a voice. And, in my experience, tenants really need to form their own organizations. If they are encompassed under the, the… sort of a kind of, you know, social justice organizing, I think that their issue will be forgotten. And this is true for the issues of poor people. I really think that poor people need to be organized on their own and get assistance from those of us who can afford to contribute to that. There are many organizations, like the Campaign for Human Development in… which is a foundation of the Catholic Church, that fund exactly that kind of organizing. So I think that the key thing is to do, or to have Viequenses who are looking for housing to organize themselves and to negotiate directly on behalf of themselves with the powers that be, whether it be the Puerto Rican government, the municipal government, the banks, whether it be the realtors, whether it be face to face with their neighbors that they may be having issues with. But I think that there is a need for new organization. And to use the civil rights laws, to use the federal housing programs with a… with a… can be applied. There are a lot of subsidies, of course, with the recent changes in federal laws, there are many more funds for home ownership than there are for renting, and that is actually in accordance with the desires of people here in Vieques.
PREGUNTA:
You make this call for new organizations. Do you think that the organizations that have been, you know, running the struggle against the U.S. Navy have some limits, concerning maybe issues of social class or discrimination or things like that? Or do you think there should be more organizations in order to diversify the struggle? How do you feel about the organizations already existing organizing the community in relation to the issue of housing? Do you think it might be a little bit in the background or… ?
CATHY GANETT:
Well, first of all, I want to be respectful and, you know, any comments I’m going to make on this subject, that I am new to this community, so my opinion can be taken with that in mind. But, as I said before, I do believe that… issues of tenant organizing of people who are fighting for getting their own home and so forth and poor people, I think, historically have needed to form their own organizations, and that organizations of the struggle were formed around a very broad basis of unity, and that is wanting to get, to get the Navy out. Although, of course, there are groups who have taken a clear stand that they want to promote development in favor of the Viequenses, the future development, and that is also friendly to the environment. So there are certainly more points on the agenda of these organizations. But it certainly hasn’t looked at the different level of struggle that somebody has to face when you are a young teenage mother with no place to live and occupying one small bedroom in the home of your parents, because you can’t find an apartment to move to.
That… those issues I think are beginning to be addressed by the Alianza de Mujeres, and I think they might be one of the groups that might pick up the ball. So, I think that it depends on how it plays itself out, but I think it’s very, very important that the voice of poor people and the people who are suffering from the injustice have a chance to speak for themselves, and not to be left out of the process.
PREGUNTA:
When people were sharing their experiences here in the community, especially people having some problems with the, with the… with housing, and finding houses and all that… Did you find a little reception to the kind of work you were doing with them? Like, was it easy for you to kind of… like, create a dialogue with the people?
CATHY GANETT:
Oh, yeah, when I went to somebody to talk about the issue, it is. I think I often had to break out of my own point of reference. Because I had been involved in the struggle here for so long, and because the people who are basically leading many of the organizations in the struggle here are the people who have homes, who are retired, who have a steady income coming in, who have jobs. They tend not to be the people… because first of all the struggle against the Navy was led by, predominantly, people I would say, you know, over 45, even over 50. I mean, it would vary because of the fact that it is very difficult for a young person to get an education. They have to leave to go to college, they have to leave to look for professional jobs that they’ve been trained for. And so very often that age group, even from teenage on through the thirties, I’ve found very few actually participating in leading or participating in the struggle in Vieques.
So, when you talk about talking to those people, you need to go beyond your immediate reference group, because I didn’t meet those people in need when I got involved in the struggle. But they are almost invisible in some ways. I often say this, because especially, it’s very sad when you think of the fact that tourists come here and they go to the beaches and they go out to the restaurants, and they go up to the fort to see the museum, and they leave Vieques without any real idea of the suffering that goes on in terms of housing, health care, the high incidence of HIV infection in Vieques, the high incidence of teen pregnancy. It’s really something that can’t be glossed over. So… I’m saying… it’s not only glossed over by the tourists, but as historically has always been true, women and people who are very poor, their voices are often not heard. And that’s something that needs to be worked on in Vieques, I believe.
PREGUNTA:
Even with some of the organizations, the political organizations… -Yeah…
Do you think the anti-Navy struggle might have helped, unfortunately, to invisibilize or… keep those voices silent?
CATHY GANETT:
I don’t know. I think that, perhaps, you know, I’ve heard people say that the struggle to get the Navy out was… while it was going on, it was ignoring other social problems. I think that can be taken… you can stand on either side of that thing and, you know, it’s just a matter of how you frame it. I think that struggle needed to be waged and that’s a bigger topic than we can talk about here, but I do believe that the Alianza de Mujeres Viequenses is working on a more personal level with people in Vieques. It’s working with younger people, and it’s working with victims of… survivors of cancer, and people in the community to be trained to give support to survivors of cancer. So, more direct service for people who are suffering. And hopefully they will be able to work on the housing issue as well, but I don’t think we should always expect each organization to work on every issue.
And so, if I had to give you my opinion right now, of what would be more effective, having been a community organizer for many years, I would like to see the growth of a separate organization to deal with the needs of housing for poor families. That we… the issue didn’t have to… fight for space on the agenda. But, you know, it’s… I don’t pretend to have a prescription or a blue print for how it should be done. I think you can’t predict the future, but it’s something that definitely is needed.
PREGUNTA:
Tell me about your feelings of doing this work of a… thinking about housing in the context of Vieques, but also having the experience of buying a house… Did some people… while you were doing the research, kind of ask you about your position, your old position in the whole issue of buying, selling and all that… -Well… was a threat for some people that you were talking or…?
CATHY GANETT:
In terms of my own status, as a property owner, no. Because I think that… I think that I am very, very clear that the Viequenses and I think Puerto Rican people in general are very open minded and basically, you know, open to North Americans and white people being good until they prove themselves otherwise. And so, for me, I came here and I bought a house and I participate in the struggle so, you know, I’ve been very visible, and I sort of put my cards on the table. So I don’t think I have had any need to be defensive. And in the one or two situations where that happened, they were people who came to Vieques from the outside and they assumed a position of criticism, but they don’t really know the community here. And so, it hasn’t been completely nil, but…
So, most of the people in Vieques are… you know, the best compliment you can be paid is to say: “Oh, Cathy, you are a Viequense.” But, they are very warm and they would say that to anybody who comes to the community with the intention of being respectful and of… becoming knowledgeable of the issues in Vieques. Because… you know, it’s really a problem of… of some people coming here to live a separate life, I think. And, although when people come here to retire, perhaps they are coming here because they are tired. A long life. But I don’t think that lets us off the hook for being aware of what’s going on in your community around you.
I think that there’s a lot that can be done. As Judith Conde said, from the Alianza, when I interviewed her, she said: “Many people come here with great skills and, you know, they could come and offer them to a youth program, and so forth.” And many do, you know. But I think that the Viequenses are looking for that, they want involvement from the North Americans, or whether it be Puerto Ricans coming to Vieques. So, as far as me creating a place here that I can live and I can also gain a little income by the apartment that I have as part of my house, people have been very supportive and I see that as a positive development.
I just thought of another issue that’s very important too, I think in terms of the future, harmony of life on the island of Vieques, and that is the issue of language. It’s not easy as a, as a native English-speaking person to bring this issue up in a community of Spanish-speaking people, but I have made my efforts to learn the language and… participate in all the community meetings that I go to, using the language and listening in the language. But there are North Americans who have… for whatever reason, do not understand Spanish, and I think it would become, it is very important to begin to publicize the issue through community information brochures and so forth, bilingually. That hasn’t been the habit in the groups that have been working in the struggle to get the Navy out of here. And perhaps at that moment I actually understood it because I actually couldn’t find any… many other North Americans who were against the Navy here. I kept looking for them here and I think if I had seen the need I would translated it myself.
But now that we are talking about the development and the future of Vieques, many of these people are, in fact, working in their own little businesses, and we need the communicate with the North Americans who have businesses here. So, translation is going to be very important. And I hope that it is part of the future of Vieques, as well as classes in Spanish and classes in English, so that classes in English, so that the Viequenses can participate in the tourism industry. And classes in Spanish, so that the North American, native English-speaking people can provide better services in their businesses and can get to know their neighbors, for all the various reasons that one needs to communicate.
PREGUNTA:
I also wanted to ask you about… what led you to being interested in Vieques in the first place, and also that story you told about how you got involved in the struggle, just to…
CATHY GANETT:
Just a little bit, yeah… I was born in Boston and spent most of my life in Boston and had the good fortune of having many Puerto Rican neighbors and friends. So, when I made my first trip to Puerto Rico in 1986, I had heard already about the struggle against the Navy, because they had made quite a stand in the late seventies and early eighties. So I came here as part of my first trip to Puerto Rico, and ever since then I always kept my ear open to what was happening in Vieques. And I returned and visited Vieques one other time. So, back in Boston, when David Sanes died, one of my Puerto Rican friends told me, and I was shocked that a bomb had killed a civilian in Vieques. You know, having been here it touched me more than the average news report would.
And that really, really blew me away when they told me that the camps had been set up and they were blocking the bombing by camping out in the bombing range. And I’m definitely a person who, who believes in direct action. I believe that we give the system some patience to change things as, you know, we have to, and we work along as much as we can for it, but there are many times when we need to get out there, and with our bodies say what we believe in. This was one of the times. And I felt, as a North American, that to… to come to Puerto Rico and to say that I don’t want any more violence in my name. I want to stand on the side of justice. That this was an opportunity to do it and with the people that I knew were loving people. So, I came here and I decided to stay, because it was such an open community, such a loving community. And I think there’s a lot of blessings being bestowed on Vieques right now, that there have been many miracles. That the international community has come together and has stood beside Vieques and Vieques is prepared to stand behind, beside other places that are fighting for… against military occupation by the U.S. military. And I think it, it… should expect a bright future, because of the miracles that have happened here, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little bit of healthy worry and anxiety that maybe we should do things a little better.
-OK, Cathy, thank you very much, and hopefully we will keep our conversation open for next time… FIN.-