Many Little Haiti residents already have indigestion over the 45,000-square-foot Magic City Innovation District proposed for their neighborhood. In 2016, developers announced plans to build a gigantic, “walkable campus” smack in the middle of the area, along NE Second Avenue from 60th to 64th Streets.
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,…
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…
HIV-positive activist Josh Robbins first warned in November 2016 that Publix, Florida’s beloved supermarket giant, was refusing to provide its workers with drugs that prevent HIV transmission. Nearly a year and a half later, the grocery chain has still not answered why it has adopted this health-care policy…
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…
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.
Amazon has narrowed its list of cities for a second headquarters to 20, and amazingly, Miami is there along with New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Austin, and Atlanta.
An average renter household in the Magic City needs $1,558 saved to break even after the holidays.
Miami TV montages always contain the same few shots: people sunning themselves on South Beach, clubgoers waving their arms in the air, old Cuban men in newsboy hats drinking cortaditos, and maybe a slow-motion shot of a crawling Rolls-Royce or some drone footage of an alligator.
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.
Miami’s zoning code states new homes built in Coconut Grove can have square footages up to 80 percent of the lot size, allowing for the largest homes of any municipality in Miami-Dade. Now hundreds of Grove residents have signed a petition demanding that new developments be no larger than 50 percent of lots.
On Saturday, November 11, 65,000 delirious fans packed Hard Rock Stadium for the University of Miami’s biggest home game in years against the hated Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Bars swelled with orange-and-green-clad crowds, and closer to UM’s campus, raucous house parties erupted. One of the largest bacchanals was at a residential home in the nearby neighborhood of Glenvar Heights, where partiers arrived by the busload.
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.”
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.
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.”
A few months ago, a Coral Gables homeowner made national headlines when he put his $6.4 million mansion on the market and said he’d accept payment in Bitcoin. So when a seller approached luxury real-estate agent Eric Fernandez with a similar proposition, he was ready for the challenge.
Miami’s unsustainable real-estate boom would inevitably reach a point when it would eat itself. Absent planning and regulation, condo developers were all but certain to begin repaving integral things like the library or city hall when the rest of downtown’s buildable land dried up.
For the past two years, three miles of roadway, including Flagler Street, has been under massive reconstruction to replace a 74-year-old water main, sidewalks, and traffic signals. Since then, dozens of Little Havana businesses have closed because of lost customers and revenue. Unfortunately, in May, Edukos, a Venezuelan gastropub, opened on West Flagler, just a block from Marlins Park. Because of the construction, John Guilarte, Edukos’ owner, struggles to keep the restaurant open.
After moving from Manhattan to Fort Lauderdale last month, Stephen Dietz and his wife were excited to snag a two-bedroom apartment in the 30-story Amaray Las Olas, a new luxury tower said to be one of the most expensive apartment buildings ever built in the city. Barely a year old, their home at 215 SE Eighth Ave. boasted private pool cabanas, a yoga studio, and a dog spa.
One of the main programs that helps poor people pay rent, the Section 8 housing voucher, awards money to needy families to help them afford privately owned apartments. But the feds won’t pay for a waterfront penthouse — rent needs to sit below a “fair market rent” threshold, a guideline the government uses to determine whether you’re blowing too much cash on a fancy home.
Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond has called the mortgage-interest tax deduction — which lets property owners cut up to $1 million off their tax bill — an “engine of American inequality.” The Atlantic once labeled the policy “a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the American tax code.”
“The point is to be able to restore power more quickly,” Bubriski says. “There is no amount of hardening that is going to stop a 50-foot-tall date palm from falling on the lines.”
