New Times howls, roughly once a week, about how expensive Miami is for the vast majority of its residents. But rarely is the city’s affordability data placed into historic context, likely leaving many people to wonder whether the city’s spiraling rents are really that much worse than they’ve ever been. “Sure, it’s expensive to live in Miami, but it always has been,” you say. “Quit yer bellyaching.”
At 3:30 a.m. on Monday, May 28, 2012, Miami-Dade County Police Officer Luis Perez drove his squad car through the Hammocks District of Miami-Dade County on a hot and humid morning. He passed a teenager, later identified as 16-year-old Sebastian Gregory, wearing a baggy black sweater, black pants, beanie cap,…
Joshua Cooper, a Tallahassee political consultant paid more than $500,000 by Florida Gov. Rick Scott to dig up dirt on Scott’s enemies over the years, swears the photo above was simply a snapshot taken at an unfortunate angle. Cooper is adamant the photo absolutely does not show him holding an ice penis next to a mannequin’s groin.
Despite outcries from community leaders, Little Haiti continues to gentrify rapidly. The Miami neighborhood — which sits conveniently north of Wynwood and the Design District and just west of Biscayne Boulevard — has been getting carved up by thirsty property developers as of late, and that trend has continued unabated in 2017.
Americans are blessed to live in a nation where cable companies can’t charge consumers extra money to access Netflix or block them from reading the New York Times online just for the heck of it. But telecom companies sure seem like they want that power, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now chaired by a former Verizon lawyer and internet-service-provider lackey.
With slightly more than two weeks to go before massive, international crowds wash over Wynwood for Art Basel, Miami officials are quietly finalizing a plan to shut down the neighborhood’s main street — NW 2nd Avenue — to vehicular traffic from Friday, December 8 through Sunday, December 10. The city…
You know how fashion trends repeat themselves every 30 years or so? The same thing seems to be happening in politics. Cheesecake-brained, women-abusing lunatics seem to be in vogue once more. Roughly a year after Donald Trump rode into Washington on a sled pulled by Rascal scooters, 1990s Miami Mayor Joe Carollo — almost certainly the craziest person to hold office in South Florida — has returned to the Miami City Commission just in time for 2017.
After voters overwhelmingly legalized medical marijuana a year ago, Florida was supposed to issue ten new pot-growing licenses to nurseries by October 3. But the state has dragged its feet in implementing nearly every aspect of the law, from issuing cards to patients to passing basic regulations on who can smoke cannabis and when they can smoke it.
For more than two decades, John Rivera was the ideal of what most cops think a police union president should be: He lied constantly, threw tantrums at even the slightest personal insult, and had zero qualms about blaming black kids for getting themselves shot by the officers he represented.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 24,000 Haitian nationals live between Miami and Palm Beach under temporary protected status (TPS), which is given to immigrants from nations devastated by political turmoil or natural disasters. Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, has been struck by both, including the infamous 2010 earthquake that leveled the island…
The last time Joe Carollo sat on Miami’s city commission, the police chief accused him of — no joke — trying to obtain an illegal concealed-weapons permit for a visiting sheikh tied to the Saudi royal family; telling the police he was being stalked and calling them into “secret” meetings that he would then refuse to show up for…
Miss Toto does not have time for your bullshit. You can either accept that Miami’s undisputed party queen is six-plus-feet of pectoral muscles, glitter, rock-hard abs, track-star thighs, shoulders so round and defined they look like cantaloupes, and the flowing tresses of a pageant queen, or you can get the…
It’s easy to mistake Steve Leifman for a psychiatrist. He’ll happily rattle off statistics about the incidence of schizophrenia in Miami-Dade County, quote a recent Journal of the American Medical Association article, or digress at length about the effects of childhood emotional trauma. Leifman is actually a criminal court judge…
Megachurches are often scams. Their owners and preachers become obscenely wealthy and don’t have to pay taxes. And a remarkably huge percentage of megachurch leaders become ensnared in ethically dubious (at best) conduct: Ultra-rich Houston pastor Joel Osteen infamously neglected to open his megachurch to Hurricane Harvey victims for days…
Last week, the FBI released its yearly log of hate crimes reported across the nation. In Florida, the data appears to show that hate-crime reports jumped 33 percent between 2015 and 2016. But that wasn’t the entire story: Many of both the Sunshine State’s and the nation’s largest police departments appear to be neglecting to report hate crimes to the FBI.
Joe Carollo was arrested in 2001 for hitting his wife so hard he left a golf-ball-size welt on her head. One of the then Miami mayor’s young daughters called 911 and begged, “Help, my dad is hurting my mom! Please come now, please!” as a woman’s screams were heard in the background. The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office eventually dropped domestic violence charges against Carollo because he agreed to attend anger-management courses.
In 2010, the Florida Housing Finance Corporation, a state body that loans money to build affordable housing, flunked an Atlanta developer called the American Opportunity Foundation (AOF) “due to past defaults, assignments, bankruptcies, or foreclosures” issued against the company’s properties in years past. As of 2010, state regulators warned that 22 of the 80 loans listed on the foundation’s report at the time were in default, so “AOF is not considered an acceptable general partner.”
Every time Miami Beach’s Animal Recovery Mission (ARM), the undercover animal-abuse investigative group led by former military contractor Richard Couto, releases a video, it gets that much harder to eat meat or drink milk from South Florida cows. This month has been a doozy for Couto. First, ARM last week released film of animal handlers at one Okeechobee farm kicking cows.
Miami is known for getting slammed by hurricanes, which tend to blow down power lines. So after Irma knocked out electricity for roughly 90 percent of Florida Power & Light’s customers in September, many residents asked why most of FPL’s lines are still above ground. The company is now reportedly “considering” burying more of its lines, but one Miami-Dade County commissioner thinks there’s a faster route to harden Florida against storms. She wants the state to force FPL to put lines underground.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will probably never be president because he once drank water like a doofus on national television four years ago. The moment, which came during a State of the Union rebuttal, was dissected with Zapruder-film-like intensity, Poland Spring got in on the action, and Rubio cemented his status as a frightened, sweaty weirdo who lost his cool over eight ounces of spring water.
Prison inmates — especially those awaiting trial — cannot legally consent to sex with guards, supervisors, or anyone else who holds that much power over their lives in government custody. That should be common sense, and it’s why the federal government defines sex between prison guards and inmates as rape. For that same reason, a prison guard at the Federal Detention Center (FDC) in Miami was sentenced Tuesday to eight months’ imprisonment after pleading guilty to raping a woman under his care.
It turns out that repeatedly holding diet-Nazi presidential rallies in a state already known for housing millions of unhinged lunatics might not have been a great way to spend 2016. According to FBI data released yesterday, Florida cops reported 96 hate incidents last year. That’s up from 72 in 2015…
