NLIHC’s Disaster Team Travels to Puerto Rico to Deepen Partnerships with Community Groups on the Island

By Noah Patton, NLIHC Director of Disaster Recovery and Meghan Mertyris, NLIHC Disaster Housing Policy Analyst 

As part of NLIHC’s ongoing work in disaster recovery, research, and resilience (DHR), NLIHC Director of Disaster Recovery Noah Patton and NLIHC Disaster Housing Policy Analyst Meghan Mertyris traveled to Puerto Rico to participate in Ayuda Legal Puerto Rico’s seventh Just Recovery Summit: "Desde aquí: Resist, recover, rebuild" in San Juan in early September 2025. The event provided a space for advocates and organizers in Puerto Rico to strategize around the island’s ongoing recovery from Hurricane Maria and other more recent disasters in the context of the current Administration’s policies, focusing on the impact those actions have had on public safety, government assistance, and civil rights programs on the Puerto Rican archipelago. Patton and Mertyris participated in a panel covering HUD-funded recovery programs and their failure to quickly reach the ground when they were needed after Hurricane Maria.  

Ayuda Legal is one of several Puerto Rico-based members of the NLIHC-led Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC), a group of over 900 local, state, and national organizations working to ensure that all disaster survivors receive the assistance they need to fully recover. Many of these members participated in this conference alongside Ayuda Legal, which has consistently been a loud and direct voice for just disaster recovery on the island for nearly a decade. Since 2017, the DHRC has maintained a Puerto Rico Working Group of housing and community-based organizations from the island and select experts from the continental US.  

In addition to participating in the conference, Patton and Mertyris were able to visit community-based organizations in different parts of the island.  

In the southern city of Ponce, the second largest municipality on the island that was heavily hit by earthquakes in 2020, Patton and Mertyris met with staff from Ponce Neighborhood Housing Services Inc. The group continues to work with survivors of Hurricane Maria and the 2020 earthquakes in repairing their homes and finding alternative housing using HUD long-term disaster recovery funds. Discussions focused on the severe lack of quality affordable housing in the region and the impact of local historic preservation requirements on the speed of repairs.  

Patton and Mertyris also visited colleagues in Caguas, a mountainous municipality near the center of the island. They met with Corporacion Milagros del Amor which provides a variety of food, clothing distribution, employment assistance, and rapid rehousing programs for those experiencing homelessness in the region. After a tour of their food and clothing distribution facilities and taking part in a learning session with some of their clients, discussions focused around funding needs for facility upkeep (the floor of their emergency women’s shelter has partially collapsed) and ways they are seeking to increase resilience in advance of future disasters.  

Finally, after returning to San Juan, Patton and Mertyris met with staff from La Fondita de Jesus, the largest shelter and homeless service organization in the urban Santurce neighborhood of San Juan. Discussions included the creation of better connections between national organizations and Puerto Rico service organizations, their advocacy with the territorial government on behalf of their low-income and homeless clients, and their current facilities. They also were treated to a tour of several buildings owned by La Fondita, which is entering its 40th year of operations, including a rapid rehousing facility in Santurce with a rooftop hydroponics farm that provides food for the organization’s soup kitchen.  

As part of NLIHC’s Disaster Housing Recovery, Research, and Resilience (DHR) initiative, coalition staff will continue to build upon the ties deepened during this trip to ensure that community-based organizations in Puerto Rico have access to the funds and expertise necessary to protect their communities from future disasters.