The House on stage: Bad Bunny, nostalgia, and the fight for Puerto Rico’s future

By Bob Gevinski

Special to The Star

In San Juan on a recent Friday night, a house was placed at the center of the Caribbean’s biggest stage.

As Bad Bunny opened his months-long residency at the Choliseo de Puerto Rico, his performance focused not on fireworks or theatrics, but with an image familiar to millions on the island: a single-story concrete house. It was modest, nearly identical to thousands of others across suburban Puerto Rico, complete with porch, chain-link fence, a bicycle on the lawn, and music drifting into the street. For many, it was a love letter to abuela’s house. A celebration of neighborhood life. A reminder of who built this place.

But beneath the roar of the crowd and the beat of pride came a quieter, more complicated reality, one that touches on a deeper tension unfolding across Puerto Rico: the celebration of a lifestyle that may no longer be sustainable, and the cultural contradictions that emerge when nostalgia becomes more dominant than planning.

The imagery of Bad Bunny’s set speaks to something deeply emotional. For many people living in Puerto Rico, the suburban home represents dignity, family, and identity. It is the physical embodiment of a story passed down: of moving up, of owning something, of being part of a community.

But that story also came with consequences. In the mid-20th century, families left urban communities like Old San Juan and Río Piedras (dense, mixed-use, walkable) for planned suburban developments built around highways and car ownership. These new neighborhoods promised space, order, and modernity, but they also required cars most couldn’t afford to maintain, disconnected residents from services and community life, and demanded infrastructure the government never fully delivered.

Ironically, the same suburban communities that were once seen as progress are now being left behind. Meanwhile, the historic urban areas that were abandoned a generation ago are being snapped up by investors, turned into short-term rentals and luxury housing. The rush to buy in San Juan’s urban core isn’t about abuela’s house in Levittown or Toa Alta. It’s about the parts of the city people once fled. If those neighborhoods hadn’t been abandoned, would they now be treated as commodities?

This isn’t just about real estate. It’s about memory, myth, and the consequence of placing cultural preservation in the hands of an unreliable system.

Bad Bunny’s residency has been framed as a cultural milestone — and it is. It has brought global attention to Puerto Rican music, identity, and pride. The first month was designated for locals only, a move many praised as a symbolic and economic stand: this culture must be experienced here, not exported. But when the international audience arrives for the second month, they will do so largely through a tourism model that has contributed to the very displacement many of Bad Bunny’s songs warn against.

Most of those visitors will not stay in hotels. They’ll stay in Airbnbs, often located in neighborhoods once built for the very families now struggling to afford them. The concert celebrates Puerto Rico’s uniqueness while fueling the economic systems that make that uniqueness harder to preserve.

This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s the tragic result of a system with no plan and no spine, one in which culture is preserved by artists while policy fails the fan base.

A major theme running through the residency, and much of the public discourse surrounding it, is nostalgia. The concert pays homage to a Puerto Rico “de antes,” where families gathered on porches, music filled the air, and children rode bikes in the street.

But how much of that memory is real, and how much is curated through longing?

In many neighborhoods, the porches were already behind rejas. Doors were always locked. Children were told where not to play. Crime, poverty, and disrepair existed even in the “good times.” What is often remembered as unity may have also been survival.

The grief over losing that lifestyle is real, but perhaps it is not just about losing the past. It is about losing the illusion that it could have lasted without transformation.

Puerto Rico spent years pointing fingers in every direction; at gringos, at tourists, at tax dodgers, at each other. But the truth is simpler and harder: Puerto Rico’s crisis isn’t just cultural. It’s structural. It’s educational. It’s political.

Unaccountable leadership survives by keeping people divided. The public argues over who belongs while those in power build nothing for anyone. It isn’t left vs. right, or diaspora vs. local, or even gringo vs. boricua. It’s a system that has failed to imagine a future, and taught the public to blame everyone but the ones holding the pen.

Privatization has become a dirty word, and gentrification has become a scapegoat. Yet privatization, when managed with transparency and accountability, is not inherently harmful. And gentrification, when paired with protections for renters and long-time residents, can bring life back to forgotten neighborhoods. The real issue is not progress, but how selectively it is distributed, and how consistently people are left behind by the very institutions meant to serve them.

Bad Bunny’s concert is a love letter; to Puerto Rico, to barrio life, to the abuela who made rice & beans and played music, to a childhood that many remember with deep emotion. But it is not a blueprint.

Culture can celebrate the past, but it cannot design the future. That work belongs to planners, educators, leaders, and communities willing to think beyond nostalgia. It requires more than pride, it requires vision.

Puerto Rico cannot preserve a lifestyle that depends on car ownership, imported food, fragile infrastructure, and empty promises from political parties. Nor can it sustain an economic model built on tourism without deeply reckoning with what is being sold, and who is being priced out.

If there is to be a cultural rebirth in Puerto Rico, it must come with political rebirth. With better schools. With housing that is not just owned, but supported. With leadership that does more than gesture at the past, but builds toward a livable future.

The house on stage at the Choliseo was a symbol. But symbols are not shelter.

The real question isn’t whether the past should be celebrated. It’s whether Puerto Rico can finally build something new. Something worth staying for.

Bob Gevinski is a resident of both San Juan and Vieques. He has served on the boards of the Vieques Conservation & Historical Trust and the Puerto Rico Hotel & Tourism Association, and is the founder of Paraiso Realty.