Havana's historic homes crumble as Cuba's housing crisis deepens

In Habana Vieja, a cracked facade is no longer just a sign of age. It has become a daily hazard, a visible tally of Cuba’s housing crisis in the capital’s most protected streets. Old Havana and its fortification system were inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1982, but the buildings now buckling there show how quickly heritage can turn into risk when maintenance, money and materials run short.

UNESCO says the World Heritage in Danger list is meant for places whose defining characteristics are threatened, and Havana’s old quarter fits that warning more each year. The causes are plain enough to residents: overcrowding, poor maintenance, official neglect and a lack of money for repairs. What that looks like on the ground is not abstract. Walking along some pavements in the historic center can feel dangerous, with masonry falling away from colonial structures that once defined the city’s prestige.

For Marnie Estevez, the crisis became personal when a storm brought down the stone staircase in her building. Her family was trapped on an upper floor until firefighters arrived with a crane to rescue her grandmother. Even after that emergency, the housing problem did not end. Some relatives were still living in a hostel years later, a reminder that collapse in Havana often creates a second crisis: nowhere stable to go next.

Elsewhere in the capital, nine families spent three years living in a boxing gym after being evacuated from a collapsed building. That is the scale of the emergency Cuba is trying to absorb. The national housing deficit has been reported at more than 855,000 homes at the end of 2023, 862,000 properties in 2025 and over 900,000 units in 2026. By the end of 2024, official figures said only 65% of Cuba’s homes were in acceptable condition, while more than a third were in fair or poor shape. In Havana alone, recent reporting says about 1,000 buildings collapse every year. By the end of 2025, the capital had 185,348 properties in disrepair, including 46,158 needing major renovations.

The toll has been lethal as well. At least six people were reported killed in Havana building collapses in 2025, including three deaths in a July collapse on Monte 722 in Old Havana, among them a seven-year-old girl. The Office of the Historian of Havana City once played a central role in restoration, and Eusebio Leal’s legacy still hangs over those efforts, but the scale of deterioration has overtaken what heritage work could hold back. In a city founded in 1519, the crumbling of historic homes is no longer only a preservation problem. It is a scoreboard of national failure, etched into the walls of Havana itself.