
Millennials returning to Puerto Rico, launching startups - albertogui
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/us/puerto-ricans-millennials-start-ups-small-business.html?referer=http://m.facebook.com
======
TheAceOfHearts
I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, but left to work in tech. As with any
place, there's some good points and there's some bad points. Below are some
points that someone moving to Puerto Rico might want to know.

In my opinion, their greatest achievement has been in its educational system.
Despite its huge list of problems, UPR enables people of any background to
receive an affordable high quality college education. In the US, you're
basically forced to take out huge loans that might take decades to pay off.
This should mean you'll get access to lots of highly educated individuals,
although I don't know if that's the case in practice.

One of my biggest complaints is its poor representation in the US government.
If you're living in Puerto Rico you can't vote in any of the US's elections,
even though the actions of the president and congress could potentially affect
you. e.g. You could get drafted and sent off to war.

Puerto Rico has its own constitution [0], which arguably grants stronger
rights to its citizens than the US constitution. For example, wire-tapping is
explicitly illegal. It also includes entries allowing employees to organize
into associations and collectively negotiate with their employers, as well as
go on strike.

An interesting point is that everyone is required to get a voter ID in order
to participate in an election. This isn't seen as a problem, and getting one
is incredibly easy. I found it incredibly surprising this wasn't the case in
the US.

Food is amazing, but there's very little variety. Since there's so few people
from different cultural backgrounds, you mostly get the same templates
repeated everywhere. In the last decade it has been slowly improving. If
you're a vegan or vegetarian, or if you require a gluten-free diet (i.e.
coeliac disease), you'll have a hard time eating out.

Due to cabotage laws, you can't import directly to Puerto Rico. Everything has
to go through a US port, which translates to increased costs.

Shipping stuff to Puerto Rico is usually more expensive than shipping stuff to
the contiguous United States. I'd guess it's comparable to Hawaii.

Even though both English and Spanish are considered official languages, you'll
have a very hard time living there if you don't know Spanish.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Puerto_Rico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Puerto_Rico)

~~~
jrs95
Isn't there a crime problem? The murder rate in PR is like 30% higher than it
is in Mexico...

~~~
adolfojp
To summarize, Puerto Rico's murder rate is higher than the murder rate of the
USA and Mexico but no place in Puerto Rico is as deadly as the deadliest
places in the USA and Mexico. Allow me to explain.

Using statistics from 2014 (because that's when I last did the research) San
Juan's murder rate was lower than the murder rate of Detroit, New Orleans, St.
Louis, Baltimore, Newark, and Oakland. It was a tad worse than Chicago. It's
also important to keep in mind that most murders in Puerto Rico are the result
of gang on gang warfare and just like everywhere else there are some good
neighborhoods and some bad neighborhoods. Compared to Mexico San Juan's murder
rate is a fraction of the murder rate of cities like Acapulco and lower than
infamous border cities like Tijuana.

Puerto Rico as a whole has a higher murder rate than the USA and Mexico
because of its ridiculously high population density. It's a small island
(roughly the size of Connecticut) but it has one of the highest population
densities in the states. Even in rural areas you're only a stone's throws away
from your neighbor. In the USA and Mexico, however, you average the murder
rate of thousands of safe and quiet towns with the murder rate of a few bad
cities so you end up with relatively good numbers.

To give you some perspective, if you were to choose between Mexico and Puerto
Rico without intimate knowledge of the two places you would probably choose
Mexico because it has a lower murder rate than Puerto Rico. But if you were to
choose between Acapulco and San Juan you would definitely choose San Juan
because its murder rate is less than a third than the murder rate of Acapulco
even though San Juan is Puerto Rico's deadliest city.

~~~
celticninja
Lies, damn lies and statistics in practice.

What I mean is statistics can be considerably more misleading when the
methodology is not explained. I found your comment incredibly helpful in
understanding the point you were making.

------
jameslk
> They are motivated both by an urge to help lift Puerto Rico out of its
> quagmire, but also by a profound attachment to the island — its beaches and
> countryside, its friendliness, its intimacy and the tug of family.

They're probably more motivated by the complete lack of federal income tax[0].
Funny that this wasn't mentioned once in the entire article.

0\. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/07/04/hate-
taxe...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/07/04/hate-taxes-move-
to-tax-free-puerto-rico-stay-american-avoid-irs/#43f7f9cf6397)

~~~
javiramos
Eric and Bryan, the two founders of Lunchera featured in the article, are good
friends of mine from MIT. They definitely didn't return to the island for tax
reasons. Puerto Ricans are passionate about their "isla" \- hard to explain to
people expecting rational reasons.

~~~
StavrosK
Not to be inflammatory, but I wouldn't expect nationalism to be hard for
Americans to relate to.

~~~
enraged_camel
He said its hard to explain it to people expecting _rational_ reasons.

------
bitshaker
For anyone looking to be in Puerto Rico, the massive tax incentives help as
well.

[http://puertoricotaxincentives.com/](http://puertoricotaxincentives.com/)

~~~
Spooky23
US Virgin Islands are similar as well.

Definitely real challenges though... these places are poor tropical
backwaters. It's a shame as it's beautiful and full of potential.

~~~
rayiner
Poor backwater compared to what? Puerto Rico has a GDP per capita between
Spain and Italy.

~~~
tomjakubowski
And a Gini coefficient (.531 as of 2011) between Guatemala (.530) and Colombia
(.535). Italy and Spain are at .319 and .359 respectively. The US as a whole
is .475.

~~~
true_religion
It's an inequality coefficient, not any kind of measure of how "nice" a
country is for someone living there.

Countries with a high Gini, tend to segregate more heavily than those who
don't, which for the typical 'rich' software developer means that they'll live
in a trendy area and know to avoid the 'ghetto'.

For example, Miami has a high gini at ~0.6 to 0.7 which gives you the palaces
overlooking shacks effect of Miami Beach.

High gini also correlates with extreme economic growth, where the benefits
fall onto a small group (e.g. software developers), and a reversion to the
mean hasn't yet taken place.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _they 'll live in a trendy area and know to avoid the 'ghetto'_

 _cough cough_ the Bay Area. Seriously, though, the Santa Clara County
metropolitan statistical area clocks in at 0.45 while New York is 0.60 [1].

[1]
[https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr10-18.pdf](https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr10-18.pdf)

~~~
Spooky23
County statistics are misleading here. Santa Clara County is a big place
(almost the size of Long Island) with lots of municipalities. New York County
is just 1 of 5 counties that encompass New York City!

If you look at Brooklyn (Kings County), the number is 0.499, Queens County the
number is 0.433.

According to another site, the citywide number was 0.547 in 2013. (
[https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/inequality-new-york-city-
we...](https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/inequality-new-york-city-wealthy-poor-
divide) )

------
pryelluw
Local here. Feel free to contact me (check profile) for anything. :)

We have a incubator called parallel18, and a couple of working spaces. It's
not a super huge tech scene but the people are awesome.

~~~
nowarninglabel
How's the internet there? I'd imagine that would be a significant barrier to
productivity.

~~~
0xbear
To boost productivity, wouldn't you want the internet to be really bad most of
the time? Like "only good enough to read textual docs and ssh into AWS" bad.

~~~
nowarninglabel
Well, depends on what you do. Sure, it can be nice to be offline for some
coding, but most work these days, even predominantly coding work, is a team
affair and requires communication to work well. Further, being able to get
quick access to docs, tickets, etc. is quite useful.

But also, if one is responsible for the functioning of significant amounts of
infrastructure, then it's not so great to have to worry about internet flaking
out in the middle of working through production issues.

But yeah if you were working on something solo, then bad internet wouldn't
matter as much.

------
bane
Puerto Rico has such tremendous potential, it's kind of a shame it's not
further along than it is. For people who've never been to it, the "feel" of it
wouldn't surprise most Americans who've spent time outside of rich major metro
areas. Lots of the really bad crime tends to be isolated to certain areas and
groups.

There's also a huge mountainous interior that's a world away from the tropical
beaches and Spanish colonial towns. Mostly that's the source of the absolutely
incredible coffee that comes from the Island.

Why it isn't more like Hawaii isn't entirely clear, but I suspect not being
fully integrated into the U.S. Federal system is part of it. The local
governance of the Island hasn't been fantastic and most of the Puerto Ricans I
know who lived there have long ago since moved to the mainland U.S. to find a
better life (many of them also then turn around and buy investment vacation
property back on the Island they spend time in every summer).

Still, if you know where to go, and where not to go, and learn some of the
local ways of doing things, it can be a very lovely place, great history, good
food, right in the Caribbean so other islands are close by...

------
somberi
Some relevant reading before you pack your bags :)

[https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/2172167...](https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/21721670-islands-debts-will-now-bring-protracted-legal-battle-
puerto-rico-declares)

And someone asked why it is not a state yet:

[https://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21723149-more-6...](https://www.economist.com/news/united-
states/21723149-more-60-puerto-ricans-tell-pollsters-they-would-commonwealth)

And an year-old article about the troubles facing PR:

[https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-
explains/2016/05/e...](https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-
explains/2016/05/economist-explains-8)

------
pavlov
I'm not American, so would someone knowledgeable indulge me the obvious
question: Why is Puerto Rico not a state while e.g. Hawaii is?

Is it the language -- a Spanish-majority state would not get the approval from
other states to join the union? Or something less obvious?

~~~
albertogui
It's hard to become a state when the majority of the population only speaks
Spanish and the island has its own constitution.

~~~
JBReefer
Probably not a huge issue - look up first home language in Texas or Arizona.
Texas is also like 50%+ Hispanic, and I can't imagine the modern GOP being
anti-Texas.

