By The Star Staff
Redeveloping public nuisance buildings into apartments, creating housing cooperatives, and restructuring the San Juan budget to promote affordable housing for people experiencing homelessness were some of the proposals that Terestella González Denton, the San Juan mayoral candidate under the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) banner, presented at La Fondita de Jesús on Wednesday to address homelessness in the capital.
“My plan is affordable housing for our people. We need to make an inventory of the more than 20,000 public nuisances. We have a budget of more than $800 million in San Juan, and we need to restructure it to provide more housing services with a subsidy program,” González Denton said in a conversation with La Fondita de Jesús Executive Director Josué Maysonet Colón that included questions from homeless people who receive services from the nonprofit organization. “Also, I have seen many underused parks in my visits to communities full of senior citizens. These parks need to be reclaimed, creating communal spaces for enjoyment and, in some, considering the possibility of shelters.”
The PDP candidate for mayor was invited by La Fondita de Jesús to present her housing plans and plans to address homelessness. La Fondita has asked all the candidates for governor and mayor of San Juan to present their programs in a series of forums.
González Denton, who stressed that she is not a politician, noted that she is running for mayor because, like the people, she wants a more humane city, with more integrated services that work and that serve populations such as older people, whom she described as “the new face of poverty.”
The candidate, who in the past headed the Tourism Company, said in response to questions from the public that short-term rentals, or Airbnb’s, should be regulated because they have increased the cost of rent.
“The concept of people renting a room as a second income has been distorted,” González Denton said. “Now there are business people with many rooms. The current platforms with so many rooms make Airbnb compete with bed and breakfasts, and the hospitality law must be applied to them, with its taxes, because they are almost a hotel.”
“I do not come with a magic wand but with proposals tested internationally and in other municipalities to implement them in San Juan,” the candidate said. “We have lost [the ability to pay] attention to people. We have to humanize ourselves again. I wish to promote this city project, using the best public and recreational spaces. We have a large population of single mothers with two or three jobs who do not have sufficient income, and we must attend to them. The resources are there, it is necessary to restructure them. There are programs in the municipality that are not having the impact they should and I intend to change them.”
Maysonet Colón said meanwhile that it is essential for political candidates to speak out about the growing housing problem in Puerto Rico to prevent more people from living on the streets.
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