For the first nine shows of Bad Bunny’s 2025 Puerto Rico residency, the tickets were sold exclusively to Puerto Rico residents. Discover Puerto Rico recorded that arrangement in its March presentation to industry partners.[1] The detail is small enough to fit in a bullet point. It changes the meaning of the invitation.
The artist’s audience extended far beyond the island. The seats did not. Left entirely to a contest among people with different incomes and different willingness to pay, some seats could have gone to visitors able to spend more on a night out than a resident could reasonably spend. Reserving performances changed who was allowed to enter that particular competition. It made residence relevant before the ticket was sold.
The residency brought the world toward a Puerto Rican cultural event while protecting some access for the people living there. An artist can make that decision about an inventory of tickets. In housing, many owners, public authorities, and competing needs make the task more complicated. The question follows us out of the arena: who must still be able to participate when the place succeeds?
A person sees a performance online. Another hears the album. A third was already planning to visit and moves the trip to a particular month. They look for flights and somewhere to stay. Each action is ordinary. Taken together, those actions enter a set of businesses and, eventually, a set of expectations about land.
An apartment with two possible futures
Take a modest apartment. For the purposes of our example, it can earn $800 a month on a year-long lease. The owner notices that similar-looking accommodation is advertised to visitors for $150 a night. Fifteen booked nights would produce $2,250 in monthly revenue. The comparison attracts attention before anyone has purchased a new towel.
At this point, a surprising number of arguments stop calculating.
The $2,250 is gross revenue. Cleaning, laundry, utilities, repairs, platform charges, furnishings, taxes, insurance, and the work of managing guests all have to be considered. The apartment may stand empty during part of the year. A canceled flight can become a canceled booking. A visitor who loses a key at midnight expects the key problem to be addressed at midnight, a small fact that is occasionally missing from the dream of effortless income. Long-term letting has expenses and risks too. Compare what the owner expects to keep after costs, payment for the work, and an allowance for things going wrong.
Suppose that, after taking these things into account, the owner still expects visitor use to leave an additional $500 a month. That expectation gives the conversion an attraction even if the owner loves the island, treats guests kindly, and buys supplies from local businesses.
Now imagine a buyer looking at that extra income. Five hundred dollars a month is $6,000 a year. Suppose the buyer wants a six percent annual return and expects that same extra income forever. Dividing $6,000 by 0.06 gives $100,000. In this very simple example, the extra earnings could support a bid that is $100,000 higher. The calculation leaves out borrowing costs, changing risks, taxes on the sale, and many other features of a real purchase. It shows how tomorrow’s expected visitors can affect the price of a home today.[2]
The tenant competes for shelter with wages received over time. The investor can bid partly on an expectation of future revenue. The visitor contributes to that expectation while purchasing only a few nights. The people need the same apartment for quite different lengths of time.
The visitor may never know there was a tenant. The purchaser may use a spreadsheet prepared by someone else. Yet the connection is quite direct: the price a short-stay customer can pay helps determine what a bidder thinks the property is worth, and that can affect the terms on which a long-term resident can occupy it. How far prices rise, and where, needs evidence from that market.
Now change one fact. The apartment was empty, badly maintained, and unavailable to anyone before the visitor business made repair worthwhile. The conversion may have added usable accommodation without directly removing an existing tenant. Change another fact: the owner had been living in the building and now rents a spare room for a few weekends. The income helps pay for repairs and allows the owner to stay. These are different housing events, even if every booking takes place on the same platform.
Follow the dwelling before and after the listing. Was it a home in ordinary residential use? An occasionally used second property? A spare room? How often is it available to visitors, and is the whole property involved? Before calling a booking a lost home, find out what the dwelling was being used for.
There is also a third possibility. Visitor accommodation is built specifically for that purpose, while homes for residents are built or protected alongside it. More guests then need not imply fewer homes. But the word “alongside” hides the hard part: the appropriate land, water, roads, financing, labor, and permissions have to be available, and someone has to make the residential side happen. A promise that growth will eventually take care of everyone is an awkward substitute for an actual construction schedule.
How far does the new money travel?
Imagine the cleaner working in the apartment we have just converted. She receives more hours. The owner receives a higher return. A shop sells extra supplies. A driver has another fare. The gains are real. Then the cleaner’s lease comes up for renewal.
If her monthly income rises by $200 and her housing costs rise by $250, she has less left for the rest of her life. Whatever caused the rent increase, the extra work has yet to improve her overall position. The jobs announcement reached her household on one side of its budget.
The owner’s experience can be entirely different. If the owner already possesses the building outright, higher accommodation revenue and a higher resale value may both be welcome. A tenant receives no automatic share of that capital gain. A young resident seeking a first home may find the same price increase described as good news for the economy and bad news for every plan in the notebook beside the bed.
The phrase “the island benefits” moves too quickly across these people. Which part of the island receives the money, and on what terms? Wages, profits, taxes, and increases in land value reach different recipients. Some recipients live nearby; some live elsewhere. Some of the money pays for goods produced outside the island. Some finances useful local investment. The pathways determine what residents gain.
An imported piece of medical equipment can be immensely valuable. An airline has to be paid. A local business may depend on imported materials. The question is what lasts for the people bearing the costs. Imported goods have uses, and the share of a payment going to their overseas producers is also money unavailable for the next round of local spending.
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis explains that Puerto Rico’s GDP includes production owned by nonresidents, including multinational enterprises.[3] What gets made on the island and what its residents earn are two different accounts. The gap matters well beyond tourism.
The same care is needed with an economic-impact estimate for an event. Was the spending additional, or did it replace spending that would have happened anyway? Did some ordinary visitors avoid crowded dates? Were the reported gains actual receipts or modeled effects? If the model counts money as it moves from one business to another, how does it estimate those later payments? A useful number can carry a claim larger than the evidence behind it.
What has become easier to do? Can the worker cover ordinary expenses with less strain? Can the business invest without exposing the family home to an intolerable risk? Does the municipality receive enough revenue to maintain its services? The answers have to survive the end of the season.
The neighborhood is smaller than the economy
An islandwide statistic can miss a very concentrated collision. Suppose an island has ten thousand homes and only a hundred shift into continuous visitor use. One percent may sound modest. If eighty of those homes are in a neighborhood with four hundred dwellings, the neighborhood faces a very different situation. The arithmetic is elementary. The political misunderstanding it can produce is not.
Housing is tied to location. A vacant dwelling far from work is an imperfect replacement for one near a bus route, a school, or a relative who provides care. A landlord does not need to remove a large share of all the island’s homes to affect the choices available on a particular street. By the same reasoning, pressure in a popular district cannot automatically describe every rural settlement or town. The scale of the evidence must match the scale of the claim.
Money can transmit pressure beyond the first neighborhood. A displaced household searches nearby. Someone who would once have bought in the first district looks in the second. Businesses follow changing customers. Transactions, tenancy changes, and household movements over time would let us trace how far the pressure traveled.
Expectations add another complication. The expected future of a place can begin changing prices before the expected visitors arrive. An owner may hold a building off the market while deciding what to do. A buyer may pay for an opportunity that never becomes as profitable as imagined. A development announcement can influence behavior long before it changes a street. By the time we count the guests, some of the relevant housing decisions may already have occurred.
A tourism bet can fail and still make housing harder. If a purchaser overpays, incurs large costs, and fails, there is no guarantee that the property immediately returns to ordinary residential use at an affordable rent. Debt, ownership disputes, repair needs, and expectations about a future recovery may intervene. A market can correct a price more quickly than it restores a household’s former life. The family that left will have made other arrangements by then.
This is where timing becomes a form of power. A well-financed owner can wait for a market. A household facing the end of a lease needs a roof next month. They enter the negotiation under very different clocks.
Near the Caño Martín Peña in San Juan, the relationship between improvement and displacement has been treated as an institutional problem. The community land trust’s own account explains that residents own their structures while the land is held collectively. The trust was created under Puerto Rico’s 2004 Law 489. Among its stated purposes is protecting residents against displacement as environmental restoration and other improvements increase the area’s attraction and land values.[4]
People wanted cleaner water and healthier streets. Those gains could also raise land prices. Without secure claims to the land, residents might win the clean-up and lose the place they had cleaned up. The trust attempts to keep improvement from becoming the means of their removal.
The dilemma can be cruel: must people accept poor conditions to preserve the low prices that allow them to remain? Asking residents to choose between a cleaner environment and an affordable home is a failure of arrangement, even when it arises from individually legal transactions. The land trust attempts to change that bargain by changing the claim on the land.
There is a broader lesson here for the timing of tourism policy. If public investment makes a district more desirable, the question of who can remain belongs near the beginning of the investment decision. Once land prices have risen, purchasing land for affordable housing can become more expensive. Once households have dispersed, consultation with “the community” may mostly reach those who survived the change. The people who would have objected are somewhere else.
We can imagine a government approaching a waterfront project in two sequences. In the first, it announces the improvements, markets the area, celebrates investor interest, and later commissions a study of affordability. In the second, it investigates tenure and housing needs while planning the improvements, creates workable protections or additional housing where warranted, and then invites the world. The second sequence may involve difficult trade-offs and imperfect execution. At least the people who live there enter the plan before their vulnerability becomes an unfortunate discovery.
The same reasoning applies at a smaller scale. A business that expects to employ a large number of workers has an interest in whether they can live within reach. A successful district can undermine its own services if the people providing those services must travel farther and farther to work. Eventually the restaurant owner asking why it is difficult to hire staff may be experiencing another part of the housing market from which the property owner benefited. They might even be the same person, arriving at the connection somewhat late.
An ordinary welcome
Jamaica Kincaid begins A Small Place by addressing the arriving tourist. The visitor who expects to inspect Antigua becomes a subject of inspection.[5] It is a reversal with consequences for how we read a landscape: the person looking has a position in what is being looked at. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Island People brings that tension into his encounters with Antiguan taxi drivers, whose livelihoods involve the visitors being scrutinized.[6] The conversation remains human even when the economic roles are unequal. Tourism can be a troubling arrangement and a person’s best available work at the same time.
Visitors have choices, but it would be a strange institutional design to make the stability of a community depend on each guest independently solving the island’s political economy before booking a room. A considerate traveler can respect residents, learn something of the place, and prefer businesses whose benefits are more rooted locally. Those choices can matter. They operate inside a market whose rules determine which options exist and what information is visible.
A listing can display the color of the bedspread more prominently than the dwelling’s prior use. A visitor may have no reliable way to know whether an apartment housed a family last month or stood abandoned for ten years. Meanwhile the owner and public authorities may have access to records the guest cannot see. Put more responsibility on the people who know the facts and have power to act. Asking a guest to solve the problem with a good heart and a booking screen lets better-informed people off cheaply.
Nor is hostility a substitute for a housing policy. The visitor buying lunch is a visible representative of a process whose decisive contracts may have been signed far away and long ago. Directing every grievance toward the person holding a beach bag can leave the actual levers untouched. It can also injure livelihoods that residents have good reason to value.
I want an ordinary welcome, one residents can offer without pretending to be pleased about losing their own place. A visitor should be able to accept it without being asked to solve everything before lunch. That takes rules and services strong enough to support the welcome. Homes have to remain available. Workers need a reasonable share of the gains. Public services must function through the busy weeks and the quiet ones. The people responsible for the place need a voice in how much of it is committed, and to whom.
Bad Bunny’s resident-only performances make one part of the issue unusually visible. A piece of the experience was reserved before global demand could consume every available seat. The harder work outside the arena is to determine where equivalent attention to access belongs, and which instruments can provide it without creating new injustices. Housing may require more construction in one district, repair in another, a different tenure arrangement somewhere else, or limits on a particular conversion. The answer will depend on what is actually making homes unavailable.
For that reason, the next step is to leave the easy image of an island filling up and examine a stranger possibility: a place can be losing people, contain many empty buildings, and still leave a working household unable to find a home.
Sources and notes
- Discover Puerto Rico, presentation to PRCC/Citywide Partners, March 4, 2025, slide 46.
- All apartment prices, occupancy levels, income changes, returns, and neighborhood counts in this chapter are hypothetical. The capitalization example values a perpetual, level extra annual net income of $6,000 at a six percent required return: $6,000 ÷ 0.06 = $100,000. It leaves out financing, changing risks, regulation, growth, and transaction costs; it is not a property valuation or forecast.
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Exports of Intellectual Property-Intensive Products Are Key Drivers of Puerto Rico GDP”, July 2024.
- Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña, “Fideicomiso de la Tierra”. The organization’s account establishes structure and stated purpose; outcomes require separate assessment.
- Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (1988), opening passage reproduced by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan.
- Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016), “The View from Jamaica Kincaid’s Antigua,” an authorized excerpt, Literary Hub, November 21, 2016.