SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico
Gladys Peña built a home the way many thousands of people in Puerto Rico, maybe most, did for decades: in makeshift fashion.
Every week for years, Peña, a cafeteria cook, set money aside until she had enough to buy a vacant wooden shack in a densely packed working-class barrio, a one-time squatters’ community a short stroll from the towers of San Juan’s Golden Mile financial district. She knocked down most of the flimsy house, bought building materials bit by bit and gradually built herself a concrete-block first floor with little more than a kitchen in it, and then a wooden second story topped by a corrugated zinc-metal roof.
Her builders were guys from the neighborhood. Her son salvaged a rusty steel stair from an abandoned building nearby and affixed it to the front of the tiny house so she could get from the kitchen to her second-story bedroom suite, which requires going outside. To hook up to electrical power, she took out a $2,000 bank loan.
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WNU Editor: I cannot imagine how these people must feel that after spending years building their home .... they now must start all over again.
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