Planet Money - The battle for Puerto Rico's beaches

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Puerto Rico's beaches are an integral part of life on the island, and by law, they're one of the few places that are truly public. In practice, the sandy stretch of land where the water meets the shore is one of the island's most contested spaces.Today we're featuring an episode of the podcast La Brega from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios, a show about Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican experience. On the island, a legal definition dating back to the Spanish colonial period dictates what counts as a beach. But climate change, an influx of new residents and a real estate boom are all threatening legal public access to some of Puerto Rico's most cherished spaces. The debate all comes down to one question: what counts as a beach?You can listen to the rest of La Brega (in English and Spanish) here. They have two full seasons out, which explore the Puerto Rican experience through history and culture. Check it out.This episode was reported by Alana Casanova-Burgess and produced by Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino and Joaquin Cotler, with help from Tasha Sandoval. It was edited by Mark Pagan, Marlon Bishop, and Jenny Lawton and engineered by Joe Plourde. The zona maritimo terrestre was sung as a bolero by Los Rivera Destino.The Planet Money version was produced by Dave Blanchard, fact checked by Sierra Juarez, edited by Keith Romer, and engineered by Brian Jarboe.Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. Maritza Caro is a short, energetic woman in her mid-60s. She lives in Rincon, on the west coast of Puerto Rico, and she was born there too. Maritza can see the sea from her home, and I met her on a nearby beach. She and her husband spend a lot of time out on the water. But a lot of the beaches around Puerto Rico have been changing. The island's government passed tax incentives to attract people to move there, and since Hurricane Maria in 2017, a lot of people, especially from the States, have been moving there.

Playa Los Almendros is one of the beaches near Maritza's home. Rincon is popular with surfers and tourists and endangered sea turtles. And it's one of the places on the island where there's been a lot of displacement of longtime residents as more luxury developments are built. Right in front of the water is this four-story condo building called Condominio Sol y Playa. It's kind of a sandy color, with white balconies that look out on this very calm sea.

When Maria hit, violent waves destroyed the building's beachfront swimming pool. In fact, the hurricane changed a lot of the coastline all around Puerto Rico. Beaches became narrower strips of sand, which means that technically buildings like this one are now closer to the water. Or maybe I should say, the water is closer to the buildings. After the hurricane,

the condo got permits to rebuild the pool between the building and the beach, and a construction crew broke ground, digging the space for the pool and laying down rebar and concrete in the loose sand for a low wall. Maritza remembers coming to the beach in July of 2021 and seeing that jarring construction site.

She told a friend. One of these days, a sea turtle is going to show up trapped in there, and everything is going to change. And the very next day, that is exactly what happened. One of the endangered hawksbill sea turtles that normally nests here had nowhere else to go, except into the construction zone behind the wall. She laid over 100 eggs before getting stuck. She had to be rescued and her nest had to be relocated. The fiasco made headlines. They found a turtle right in the middle of the construction

site. This uproar over the construction site in Puerto Rico was really about much more than this one swimming pool. It was about what counts as a beach and who the beaches are for. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alana Casanova-Burgess. And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. Alana is joining us from the amazing podcast La Brega, a co-production from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios, all about Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican experience. Their latest season explores some of the iconic songs that define the island. And today we are turning the show over to her to share a story and some music all about the very intense,

very complicated fight over Puerto Rico's beaches. Yeah, in Puerto Rico, by law, beaches are un bien de dominio público, a good in the public domain. They belong to the people. And it's something a lot of Puerto Ricans take very seriously, not just as a way to relax on the weekends, but as a part of our history and our culture. But where exactly the beach begins and ends, that isn't always as clear. Today on the show, the fight over one swimming pool, the centuries-old law that is supposed to say what does and doesn't count as a beach. And what happens when people try to apply that law in a world that is very, very different from when it was created.

To understand the fight playing out over whether or not the owners of Condominio Sol y Playa in Rincon can rebuild their swimming pool, you first have to know a little bit about the legal definition of a beach in Puerto Rico. There are basically two big rules. The first rule we mentioned before, beaches belong to everyone and to no one. They cannot be owned. They are public. The second rule tries to define what even counts as a beach in the first place. And that definition rests on this wonky legal term that is on everyone's lips in Puerto Rico these days. Zona marítimo terrestre. Zona marítimo terrestre. Zona marítimo terrestre.

Zona marítimo terrestre. The maritime terrestrial zone. To explain how the zona marítimo terrestre works, I'm going to play you a song, an old bolero by the Puerto Rican singer Silvia Rezach. She sings from the point of view of the sand, stretched over the beach, and she pleads with a wave that almost touches her, but then pulls back. This wave sometimes crashes against wet sand,

and she gets her hopes up, thinking that it'll reach her. Her voice rolls like the surf, and you can feel her loss, grasping at a lover who is as completely indifferent to her as a wave is to dry sand. So what does this have to do with the fight for beach access? Because the legal definition of Puerto Rican beaches as a space that belongs to the public depends on this exact concept. What sand gets touched by the waves and what sand doesn't. In Puerto Rico, the difference between high tide and low tide is a few feet in most cases.

Veronica Gonzalez-Rodriguez is an environmental lawyer and professor at the Inter-American University in San Juan. We met on a beach in San Juan. We're both barefoot. Our toes are in the loose, cool sand just before sunset. We have this concept of the maritime terrestrial zone that establishes by law that anywhere where the tides can be measured that are sensible, the high tide will mark common public land. This definition dates back to the 1800s,

when Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain. All laws in Puerto Rico are colonial, but this one is from the old regime, not the current one. It was written for a Spanish context. Certain area of the beach was cleared, the no permanent constructions, so that in case there was a storm, those boats could be carried into land and therefore not be destroyed by the storm.

Then an extra 20 meters were also supposed to be cleared for public use, so that the police could patrol and look out for contraband coming in. Late in the 19th century, people did not go to the beach to have a beer and get a suntan. That's not how we related to the coast back then. Now, in Spain, where the law comes from, the difference between high and low tide can be really noticeable, as much as several meters on the north coast. This means there's just a lot more area in that tidal zone where the waves hit the shore.

The public area can be bigger in Spain. But in Puerto Rico, unless there's a storm or an unusual tide, day in and day out, those waves are crashing on the same sand over and over again. It means the public area of the beach is much slimmer here. So this law that was written for a whole other part of the world feels a little misplaced here and antiquated. Not only that, but it also kind of doesn't sound like a law. It sounds very lyrical. Let me translate it for you, though it sounds less pretty in English.

A lot of things do. The Maritime Terrestrial Zone is defined as the part of Puerto Rico's coasts that the sea bathes in its ebb and flow, where you can feel the tides, or where the highest waves during the storms reach when the tides are not sensible. It's almost calling itself to be put to music. So much so that we asked the San Juan-based group Los Rivera de Estino to sing the words as a bolero for us. It's kind of poetic, it's sort of lyrical. It is, it's beautiful, it's lyrical, but it also is short and kind of vague. It's short, it's kind of vague, and usually lawyers like vague, right?

It gives us space to work with. But when you're creating public policy, and public policy that affects the lives of so many people, it creates issues. Issues. Plural. The law is vague because it uses something as ephemeral as tides to define the zona marítimo terrestre. And also because it gives the government this other way to measure what part of the beach should be public. Use the highest waves in a storm. W waves that ultimately reach so much further inland. Picture that. It would mean so much more of the sand and beyond would be in a no-build zone.

The government often uses the first part of the law, about how high the tides reach, to define what counts as the public good part of the beach. And that allows a lot more construction on Puerto Rico's coasts. It means that the swimming pool, in 1997 at least, was okay to build. Officials decided that it wasn't in the ZMT. But climate change and erosion are accelerating the way the coastline changes every year. Which means where the beach is is is also moving around. But only if the government redraws its maps and reconsiders what is now public beach. And it wasn't clear that the government had

done that for this beach in over 20 years. On top of that, what Puerto Rico has that Spain doesn't have are these hurricanes that bring the sea inland. If the government used the second part of the law about how high the highest waves in a storm reached, a storm like, say, Hurricane Maria, the proposed swimming pool would very much be on the beach, and they couldn't build it. Developers prefer when the government uses the tide-based definition. Others, like Mariana Nogales,

think the tide-based definition doesn't make like Mariana Nogales, think the tide-based definition doesn't make sense in a place like Puerto Rico. Another definition would be more accurate, and that would be, where did the tide go after Hurricane Maria? Mariana is a representative at large in the Puerto Rican legislature and an advocate for changing the law so that the broader definition of the beach becomes the only standard. And that would be more precise, particularly for all the coming hurricanes that we can expect to have. Love is inexact, and so is the marítimo terrestre. Mariana's office gets calls from constituents all over Puerto Rico about construction projects that block access to beaches,

or which displace people. They're feeling all of this very deeply in their lives, this assault on the beaches. I think it's part of what makes us Puerto Ricans, and I think it is one of the things people here have a clear idea of what the fight is for. She notes that there's a long history, since at least the 70s, of more focused fights against specific developments in Puerto Rico. 20 years ago, you might remember, activists won a decades-long battle to push the U.S. Navy out of Vieques and Culebra. And what was that but an attempt to take back the beaches? The Navy had agreed to move some air targets, return some acreage, stop shelling on the weekends. Now their magnificent beach could at least be used on Saturdays and Sundays.

For over a decade, activists campaigned against the expansion of a courtyard marriott in Isla Verde. Throughout the island, people have been pushing back. There's been a fight for the beaches, a whole protest movement that's all about the space on the coast. It's even been violent. In January, private security guards fired at protesters at one illegal construction site. A protester fighting against this private development built on public land in Aguadilla was shot in the leg over the weekend. Las playas son del pueblo. The beaches belong to the people.

By Puerto Rican law, all beaches on the island are public. I want to linger on that line so it doesn't wash over us. In a country that belongs to another country, that refrain, asserts an ownership. This is ours. What's different now is that it's kind of like the name of that movie. Everything, everywhere, all at once.

We are facing a new type of colonization. It's an attack everywhere. Everywhere and from everywhere. Since Hurricane Maria, there's been an influx of people moving to Puerto Rico for tax incentives, who come not only with a lot of capital to invest in luxurious beachfront properties, but with a different perception about beaches. An understanding, Mariana says, that beaches can be private, or at least restricted. It's not only newcomers who see the possibility of construction and development along the coasts.

Every recent governor has wanted to see more development, and the current one, Pedro Pierluisi, is no exception. According to the Center for Investigative Journalism, in 2021, the first year of his administration, the government approved nearly 30% more coastal construction permits than in the previous year. Again, Veronica Gonzalez. Every one of them seems to have the same great idea to improve our economic situation. We need to get permits out faster and build more and construct more because we have to get jobs to people, right?

And that will fix everything. Over a year ago, a panel of scientific advisors urged the Puerto Rican government to adopt a moratorium on coastal construction. Experts have said there's not a moment to lose to take action. But the governor declined and said that decision seemed excessive to him, that it needed more study. He addressed it in a press conference. There needs to be a balance, a just one, he said, because he's hearing from people on both sides. There are those who think more development, more construction,

is good for Puerto Rico. It's going to create jobs and lift the archipelago out of debt and austerity. And there are those who worry that Puerto Rico is being sold from under them, with more and more condos and swimming pools dotting the coasts. After the break, what happened to the swimming pool in Playa Los Almendros? And what counts as the beach in Rincón? According to certain data, the economy is doing great. According to certain headlines, a recession is coming. According to a lot of normal people, well, things would be okay if

it weren't for inflation. And so the published data, the interpretation on aggregate of the published data, and then the lived experiences of individuals can all go in different directions. And an economy that looks so different to different people makes it that much harder to make policy. This phase of monetary policy tightening, this next several quarters, is the hardest in the entire tightening cycle that we've had. How policymakers are walking a tightrope. That's in our recent bonus episode. Make sure to check it out if you're a Planet Money Plus listener. And if you're not, you can sign up at the link

in our episode notes. In the days after the public outcry about the trapped sea turtle in Playa Los Almendros in Rincon, the government ordered a stop to the construction after the public outcry about the trapped sea turtle in Playa Los Almendros in Rincon, the government ordered a stop to the construction at the swimming pool. At first, it was because the permitting process hadn't been followed correctly. Protesters established a permanent encampment on the beach. And almost immediately, things got pretty intense. Armed police have been filmed beating protesters and dragging them away. Meanwhile, the case made its way through the courts.

The issue became about the zona maritimo terrestre. Could anything legally be built on this spot, in this loose sand? Last June, the agency responsible for determining where the zona maritimo terrestre begins and ends annulled the old lines that had allowed the swimming pool, and officials said they'd be redrawn. The courts eventually ruled that the construction was permitted illegally, and what had been built had to go. And then, nothing happened. For months. The condo owners didn't remove the wall, and the courts didn't compel them to. Until...

July 4th, 2022, when protesters convened on this beach to clear the concrete and rebar away themselves. That's the day I met Maritza Caro, the woman who lives in Rincon and had predicted a sea turtle would be caught up in the construction. There she was, a woman in her mid-60s, wielding a sledgehammer, thwacking away at the concrete wall. She took some pieces of rubble, as though she had just taken a turn tearing down the Berlin wall. People had come from all over Puerto Rico to try to enforce the court's own ruling,

to remove what had been built on their beach. For Maritza, this showed how big the protest had become, how far beyond Rincón it had reached. For many reasons. My voice is breaking because you don't expect this. You don't expect this. Her voice was breaking just thinking about how unexpected all this was. The people that you... How every person... Every person is a grain of sand. Is like another grain of sand.

To fill the mountain. Building up to a mountain. The people... grain of sand, building up to a mountain. And at one point, when protesters unfurled a massive Puerto Rican flag, it was Maritza who took the bullhorn to sing a song that's like the unofficial anthem of Puerto Rico, a love song called Preciosa. A song that describes the beautiful waves that have and will always bathe Puerto Rico. Just a couple of months after this protest, Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico, and the waves from that storm reached all the way to the construction site on Playa Los Almendros.

So in December, when the government announced the new lines of where the ZMT begins and ends, they didn't use the high and low tide line. Instead, they used the other part of the definition, the one about the highest waves in the storm, to figure it out. The result was clear. The site of the swimming pool was officially on the beach, on public sand. That was Alana Casanova-Burgess from the WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios podcast, La Brega. If you enjoyed this episode, go check out their feed. They have two entire seasons with episodes in both English and Spanish, all about Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican experience. But really about so, so much more with stories that resonate way beyond the island. It is amazing. Go check it out.

This episode was produced by Ezequiel Rodriguez-Andino and Joaquin Kotler with help from Tasha Sandoval. It was edited by Mark Pagan, Marlon Bishop, and Jenny Lawton. LaBrega's audio engineer is Joe Clore. The Planet Money version was produced by Dave Blanchard, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, edited by Keith Romer, and engineered by Brian Jarboe. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

This is NPR. Thanks for listening.