Seven years after Hurricane Dorian wreaked havoc on Grand Bahama, the city of Freeport is bounding back, with cruise lines bringing thousands of tourists to their picturesque shores again.
Yet nearly half of the housing for locals on the island in the Bahamas remains damaged and unsafe. Some people are still living in these homes, while many workers commute from nearby islands. Estimates show that 6,000 to 10,000 people left after Dorian. Now, many of them want to return, but there simply are not enough places for them to live.
To address this shortage, the minister for Grand Bahama is working to build affordable, resilient housing and a flexible emergency center for storm event response that will double as a much-needed community activity hub in “blue sky” conditions. University of Miami experts in architecture, healthcare and disaster planning are helping to design these facilities, alongside the nonprofit Resilient Cities Catalyst (RCC).
And this collaboration was recently selected as a Commitment to Action project featured at the Clinton Global Initiative during Climate Week NYC. The two-day annual meeting aims to highlight and support “new, specific and measurable projects and programs that advance climate resilience, economic inclusion and humanitarian response,” among other goals.
“The idea that you can make really resilient infrastructure that is locally financed and locally led, that’s always been the dream in global health, and this project epitomizes those things in a way that is garnering a lot of attention,” said Dr. Elizabeth Greig, assistant professor of medicine and co-director of the Global Institute for Community Health and Development at the Miller School of Medicine.
Greig is no stranger to disaster response. She managed the University’s field hospital in Haiti with Project Medishare in the aftermath of the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake. Following Hurricane Dorian in 2019, she brought a team of doctors to the Bahamas to assist local healthcare professionals who were overwhelmed with patients, and the Global Institute has created other programs for Bahamian children since then.
Through her work in the Bahamas, Greig met Ginger Moxey, minister for Grand Bahama, who reached out for the University’s guidance on creating a community resilience framework in Freeport that could be replicated throughout the island and beyond. Greig connected her with the University’s Climate Resilience Institute and the Center for Urban and Community Design (CUCD) to provide guidance on resilient housing opportunities and assistance to more swiftly navigate the complex procedural landscape. Now the team is working with government leaders in Grand Bahama to streamline the provision of these needed housing units.
However, the project began in the summer of 2025 when Greig and Michael Berkowitz, executive director of the Climate Resilience Institute, visited Grand Bahama to assess local needs. That fall, the CUCD led a School of Architecture studio class to explore resilient housing models for nearly 400 sustainable housing units in the Freeport neighborhoods of Garden Villas and Drake Avenue, as well as a Resilience Center.
This past summer, physicians and emergency management experts from the Global Institute also visited Grand Bahama to help residents prepare for hurricane season. They offered training on emergency response planning and discussed programming considerations for the future Resilience Center.
Greig believes this initiative could offer other communities a strategy for rebuilding after disasters.
“The experience with Hurricane Dorian colors everything that you talk about when speaking with people in the northern Bahamas, so this project has the longer view of how to make things more resilient to prevent the next disaster from affecting people so catastrophically,” Greig said. “It could also be a model for other places still recovering from disasters like Colombia, Venezuela and even Jamaica.”
Berkowitz agreed. “Disasters are tragic, disruptive and exacerbate existing community stressors, but they are also opportunities to rethink how our communities can be designed for equity, economic growth and risk reduction,” he said.
The collaboration with RCC, the Climate Resilience Institute and CUCD has also helped the Bahamian government drive the project forward and position it for funding that may accelerate construction and protect residents during future storms.
“Every country has all these dreams of things that they want to do, but getting it from idea to execution is always troublesome, particularly in a post-disaster setting with many competing priorities,” Greig added. “This is a new business model where everyone is leveraging each other’s strengths to help the Bahamas have a sustainable future and ultimately save lives and money.”
