Miamians Need to Earn Nearly $50,000 to Afford a Two-Bedroom Apartment

Living in a home with more than one room shouldn’t really be considered a luxury in 21st-century America. The richest nation on the planet certainly has the resources to make sure single working parents or janitors on 12-hour shifts aren’t forced to live in hovels. Yet here we are: The nonprofit National Low-Income Housing Coalition released a report yesterday titled “Out of Reach,”…

Miami Has a Four-Year Backlog of Overbuilt Luxury Condos Amid Affordable-Housing Crisis

By nearly every metric, Miami-Dade County is one of the most difficult places to live if you don’t make a ton of money. The county’s median income is a staggeringly low $44,000, compared to the $80,000 median income in a comparably expensive city such as Seattle. That means Miamians wind up spending a higher percentage of their incomes on rent than residents of any other city in America.

Family Says Miami Wrongly Trying to Demolish Their Home to Cure “Urban Blight”

This month, the City of Miami rolled out a plan to “clean up” blighted areas — by bulldozing homes the city says are “drug dens” and “harboring illegal activity that is concerning to neighbors.” New City Manager Emilio T. Gonzalez trumpeted the urban-renewal plan Safe City at a March 15 news conference while a backhoe plowed through a derelict, 92-year-old Little Havana home behind him.

Five Awful Ideas Pitched to Fix Miami’s Affordable-Housing Crisis

The nation’s affordable-housing woes are, at their root, a problem of allocating resources. The richest nation in the history of the world absolutely has enough supplies and space to ensure that every person or family has a usable, affordable home. But that’s not the world we live in: Instead, poor people…

LGBT Publix Employee Says He Was Fired for Reporting Anti-Gay Harassment

This week, Publix responded to pressure from LGBTQ groups and agreed to provide “pre-exposure prophylactic” (PrEP) preventative HIV medications for employees. But the Fortune 100 supermarket chain still has a long way to go to combat its reputation as a hostile place for gay workers. Take former employee Juan Pastran,…

Five Stories of Publix Mistreating LGBTQ Workers

Publix remains one of the most popular and beloved retail chains in the entire South, despite the fact that the Fortune 100 corporation has been repeatedly accused of mistreating its LGBTQ workers. The chain has been fighting anti-gay accusations for years — but instead of working to rid itself of…

Miami Considered a Previously Toxic Northwest Dade Lake for Amazon’s HQ2 Site

In 2015, residents living near Lake Carmen, a manmade body of water in unincorporated Northwest Miami-Dade, complained that a landowner had tried to fill in the lake with toxic soil, which included traces of reclaimed asphalt, tile, lead, arsenic, and petroleum. But the county’s Department of Environmental Resources Management (DERM) says it’s…

Miami Wants Amazon to Build Its Giant New Headquarters in Overtown

Overtown residents were already worried about the proposed Miami Innovation District and the under-construction Miami WorldCenter, both of which cross into the historically black neighborhood. The once-segregated area has been systematically destroyed by terrible urban planning for decades. Now locals worry that without better regulations, the new buildings will drive up real-estate prices and push out longtime residents.

Miami Judge Threatens Major Mortgage Company Lawyers With Criminal Charges for Hiding Documents

Ditech, one of America’s largest home-loan companies, achieved fame in the 1990s with TV commercials that showed its competitors complaining they had “lost another loan to Ditech.” The company largely vanished during the 2008 housing crisis but has since rebounded and remains one of the largest mortgage service firms in America. It brings in revenues in excess of $1 billion per year and handles thousands of home-foreclosure cases annually.