Miami-Dade’s jail system has been a mess for years. The downtown Pretrial Detention Center is now almost 60 years old. In recent years, the Department of Justice has blasted the county for operating leaky, roach-infested jails with overflowing urinals. And just last week, a correctional supervisor sued Miami-Dade for employment violations because the mold inside the detention center is so bad she can’t breathe.
When Tricia Fowley’s great-uncle moved to Surfside almost 70 years ago, he built three homes for his family on the corner of Harding Avenue and 93rd Street. Two of them were eventually knocked down to build a parking lot; Fowley grew up in and eventually inherited the third house — a two-bedroom, two-bath with a brick façade only one block from the beach.
Wynwood is Miami’s least remarkable neighborhood. South Beach is one of the world’s most iconic art deco cityscapes. Little Havana is a melting pot of Cuban and American traditions that exists nowhere else on Earth. Wynwood has street art, endless EDM, and $17 cocktails. You could pluck any Wynwood bar, pop it into Brooklyn or Seattle or Portland or Los Angeles or Austin, and nobody would notice a thing.
Nusret Gökçe, better known as Salt Bae, has built a global restaurant empire by turning himself into a sodium-tossing, skimpy-T-shirt-wearing Instagram meme. But the Miami outpost of his Nusr-Et steakhouse chain has been troubled from the start, bedeviled by lukewarm reviews and the Turkish chef’s decision to engage in some Fidel Castro cosplay.
There are perfectly legitimate worries that Airbnb gentrifies neighborhoods and makes cities even less affordable than they already are. But so far, cities have had a hard time figuring out exactly how to handle the service, which lets homeowners rent their properties for days at a time. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is locked in a fierce fight with the company over his city’s plan to crack down on Airbnb.
On a Saturday morning in 2013, Shalonda Rivers woke up early, ate a breakfast of microwaved oatmeal, and put a mop to her linoleum floor. It was the first step in her weekend cleaning routine, an ongoing battle against grime, pests, and mold that began when she moved into the…
By nearly every metric, Miami’s housing and rental markets are Kafkaesque nightmares. Few people can afford their homes here because they are expensive, while median incomes are embarrassingly low. It’s a dangerous predicament — one natural disaster could throw tons of cash-strapped homeowners spiraling into bankruptcy.
Earlier this year, real-estate analyst Peter Zalewski warned that South Florida developers had so overbuilt luxury condos for the global 1 percent that it would take an estimated four years to sell them all. At the rate condos were selling in downtown Miami, he found, the 505 available units would have taken nearly 6.5 years…
Miami Beach has established itself as one of the most anti-Airbnb cities in the country, banning short-term rentals across much of the island and issuing $20,000 fines for illegal listings. But so far, those fines have been aimed at property owners, not platforms like Airbnb. Last week, city commissioners moved to…
Miami’s cost of living remains relatively similar to that of other major, rent-crunched cities, such as Seattle and Boston. But — as New Times repeats so often it has turned into our meditation mantra — the county’s median household income level, which hovers around $43,000, is significantly lower than that of any other city of similar size and relative level of economic importance.
Miami Beach’s affordable-housing crisis is nothing new, and its elected officials know that. Seven years ago, the city adopted an ambitious plan to create at least 16,000 new affordable units by 2020. But last summer, commissioners admitted there was no way the city could hit that goal and voted to extend the deadline and reduce the goal to only 6,800 affordable units.
As the medical marijuana market continues to bloom around the Sunshine State, Curaleaf, one of South Florida’s main cannabis providers, is about to open the state’s first drive-thru pot dispensary.
At the end of Charles Avenue in the West Grove sits a freshly painted two-story house with white wooden siding and lemon-yellow trim. On a chain-link fence out front, a graffiti-covered cloth banner proclaims, “Historic ‘Stirrup House’ Bed and Breakfast: Coming soon.”
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,”…
The mansion’s owners, with an eye on Little Haiti’s impending development, are looking to sell the haunted property.
If you ask a random visitor to name five things Miami is famous for, “nice restaurants” is bound to make the list. There’s a reason rich people hang out here, after all. No one is laying out $3 million for a beachfront condo if they have to eat dinner at Denny’s on a Friday night.
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.
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.
On a frigid night in January, blue and purple lights strobed onto hundreds of amped-up faces in a dark club in downtown Miami. As an EDM version of “Don’t Stop Believin'” pulsated from the speakers at E11even, burlesque dancers in flapper costumes shimmied on two stages. Men dressed in tailored…
For those trying to find affordable housing in Miami Beach, it’s been a long wait: More than 500 households have been on the city’s waitlist since 2015, while the Beach’s nonprofit affordable-housing provider has 1,200 people in its backlog.
The City of Miami Beach admitted last year that asking local developers to build affordable housing for poor and working-class people had totally failed over the past decade. But the effects of that failure on local residents haven’t been completely clear — until now, and the results seem bleak.
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…
