But that’s a gamble. Over the last century, Puerto Rico has produced landmark social housing projects like El Falansterio in San Juan, an Art Deco-detailed waterfront complex from the 1930s that, all these years later, remains a thriving community and a model of elegant, humane design.

Unfortunately, anyone who knows about rising construction costs, the island’s crippled bureaucracy and its legacy of failed projects, and the federal government’s looming deadlines for spending reconstruction money also knows that the only things that may actually end up getting built are sprawling, quasi-suburban projects on cheap, shovel-ready agricultural land, uncoordinated with services and transit.

And also a bunch of luxury hotels and condo towers on the coast.

“The system favors cheap and quick solutions,” said Federico del Monte, president of the Puerto Rican Planning Society.

Omar Marrero, who runs Puerto Rico’s Central Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, demurred while acknowledging the problems. “We will try to keep communities intact,” he said. “But to the extent the legal requirements don’t allow us to use federal dollars, families will have to decide whether they want to remain where they are.”

Carmen Chévere Ortiz has decided already. She became accustomed over the years to floods in Villa Calma, an informal working-class community near the northern coast of the island that lies below sea level.

“But Maria was different,” she told me the other day. The area was swamped in minutes by what seemed to her like a tidal wave that suddenly swept away houses and cars. “We lost everything,” Ms. Chévere said. “Now I just want to get out of here as fast as possible.”

On the other hand, many islanders in similar predicaments, like Mr. Torres, won’t want to leave, free apartment or not.