Cataño residents fight municipality’s attempts to seize their beachfront properties.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
By EVA LAUREANO
After decades of surviving the relentless grit of New York’s construction industry, 76-year-old retired contractor Eliseo Mena in 2011 was able to trade the city’s gray skyline for the turquoise horizon of Cataño, only to find his hard-earned sanctuary under siege.
His beachfront property, a vacation home, has been swept into a controversial wave of forced expropriations approved by the Cataño Municipal Legislature in January. As the San Juan metro area municipality pushes to transform its historic waterfront -- specifically his home in Avenida Las Nereidas and other properties in La Puntilla sector -- into a high-end gastronomic tourism zone, lifelong residents and retirees alike are discovering that the very land they worked to secure is now being targeted for redevelopment into public restrooms, hotels, and luxury apartments.
A large sign on Mena’s house reads: “At last I am retired. Now I need my house, but the mayor is expropriating it.”
Vivian Pitre, the house’s administrator, said the city started pressuring residents such as Mena to sell long before the expropriation was approved. In 2023, the city put a sign at the house declaring it a public nuisance. Pitre said that although the house, which in 2023 was worth more than $270,000, needs paint, its yard is always trimmed and cut. Mena travels back and forth between New York and his vacation home.
The Municipal Revenue Collections Center (CRIM by its acronym in Spanish) is charging him $7,000 to $8,000 in property taxes, contending that he built a second floor to the house, which he says is not true, and that it was a second home. Pitre said the debt could give the city another excuse to expropriate. Failure to pay property taxes in Puerto Rico results in swift penalties, including heavy surcharges and 10% annual interest, as well as the placement of a tax lien on the property by CRIM. Persistent non-payment leads to the attachment and public auction of the property. As the house is across from City Hall, Pitre noted that city officials can clearly see that the home does not have a second floor, but they have not modified the debt.
“He is retired but he is capable and has all of his senses …” Pitre said. “They have no right to expropriate.”
Two houses down from Mena’s house on Nereida Avenue, Jorge Rodríguez has owned a two-floor house for decades. While his home is not targeted for expropriation, residents suspect it will be soon to make way for the tourism and commercial development plan, because the city has engaged in actions that appear to be part of a concerted plan to force him to sell.
Rodríguez has been having trouble accessing his home for some time because the city took a portion of his driveway when they closed a street used to access the beach with cables. He sued the city because he is unable to park in his own driveway. The entrance to his house was also spray-painted in white.
“He is parking at my house and then walks through the beach to go to his house,” said Grisselle González, a retiree who has lived on a beachfront property on Nereida Avenue since the 1980s.
González’s driveway was also impacted by the municipality, and her husband was forced to install cables to protect the driveway so they could park their vehicles. In González’s case, it is not the first time she has fought along with other residents against the city’s attempts to expropriate their homes. She engaged in activities to stop the late former Mayor Edwin Rivera Sierra from taking away her home to pave the way for a huge statue of Christopher Columbus in the 1990s.
Although that project ultimately did not move forward there — and was instead built in Arecibo — the municipality did purchase a lot in the area.
González said she and her neighbors have received offers to buy their homes for commercial development along the coast, but she has refused.
“Many of us are long-time residents who have lived here all of our lives,” she told the STAR.
The expropriations are not the only actions alarming residents, who are also wary of the possibility of fraudulent moves to snatch the properties. At least 25 residents of La Puntilla sector in Cataño have discovered their homes are listed under the names of strangers within the CRIM digital database, amid ongoing municipal revitalization efforts. While residents claim ownership based on historic, often informal, land improvements dating back to the 1920s, official records show those properties were merged into larger, unrelated parcels, sparking fears that fraudulent property transfers are appearing under different names.
Viviana Maldonado Morales, representing her mother Providencia Morales Flores, a resident of La Puntilla, stressed that many local properties remain legally tied to their original owners.
Morales Flores’ residence at 14 Canal Street -- a legacy from her parents, José Julio Morales and Carmen Flores -- is a prime example. Documents shown to the Center for Investigative Reporting and to Rayos X show the island Department of Public Works and the Puerto Rico Planning Board officially transferred the lot to her grandfather, José Morales as early as 1960. However, the CRIM’s digital property registry contradicts those official records, listing the owners as Manuel Vargas, Benjamín Ocasio González, and the late Laura Esther Concepción, none of whom are known to the family or associated with that specific property.
Pitre, who worked at the CRIM in Dorado, told the STAR: “It could be an error, but to actually put two or three homes under another person’s name, is not.”
The STAR could not reach Cataño Mayor Julio Alicea Vasallo for comment on Sunday, but he has publicly said the expropriation of the properties approved in January serves two purposes: to build infrastructure for public use and to protect the community from investor speculation. Cataño lost some 7,000 inhabitants (nearly a quarter of its population) between 2000 and 2020. An estimated 325 to more than 400 properties in Cataño are considered abandoned or vacant. Residents do not oppose development to revitalize the city, but not at their own expense.
Cataño closed the 2024-2025 fiscal year with an operating surplus of approximately $12.1 million. This follows a “historic” surplus of $12.6 million reported for the 2023–2024 period.
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