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,…
Miami Beach residents have a contentious relationship with drones. Hang out on the sand on a sunny weekend and you’re bound to see at least a few buzzing over the surf, filming crowd shots of scantily clad sunbathers. In fact, there are so many that Miami Beach passed an ordinance banning the flying devices from filming through condo windows…
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.
One look, and Ken Fusco knew his son was gone. Lying on his childhood bed in dark-washed jeans and a Western-style belt, the garrulous 24-year-old almost looked asleep. But Jason’s skin was ashen, and he wasn’t breathing. Ken’s older son, Michael, carefully moved Jason to the floor and began CPR…
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.
When disaster strikes, health care is often one of the first things to slip through the cracks as unexpected expenses pile up. That’s especially true for sexual and reproductive health care.
In the 1980s, cocaine was ubiquitous in Miami. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of yeyo was regularly seized from the airport, while the local drug trade generated $12 billion annually. The morgue became so jam-packed that the coroner’s office had to rent a refrigerated truck from Burger King to fit all the bodies.
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.
In September 2016, Ari Sweetbaum told the Miami City Commission a devastating story. His parents had bought a house in Coconut Grove in 1980 next to Blanche Park. His mom toiled every day in their yard, building a thriving tropical garden behind the home where Ari grew up.
Authorities say aspiring local rapper Darrish Bernard Martin, AKA Young Bernie, was part of a crime ring that broke into dozens of pharmacies across South Florida and made off with bottles of prescription-strength cough syrup that were then sold to Lil Wayne and other “purple drank” aficionados. In a letter…
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…
Hunting invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades is no easy task: Trackers have to spot the world’s largest snake species amid the sawgrass and swamps of the protected land, but they’re often no match for the highly camouflaged constrictor. But one team of snake hunters has a new tool for finding pythons: high-tech thermal drones.
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.
In the wake of Hurricane Irma, power outages shut down almost 70 percent of traffic lights in Miami-Dade County. The result proved what most of us already instinctively knew: Literally no one in South Florida knows how to use a four-way stop.
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…
They don’t call this place the Magic City for nothing,” Louis Aguirre says with a chuckle. “Coming back to Miami is my full-circle moment.” You know Aguirre. He spent years on local TV before heading to the West Coast to become cohost of CBS’s Entertainment Tonight spinoff, The Insider. But…
Police blocked off the streets and locked the doors to Miami-Dade County Hall as a group of infuriated protesters gathered outside. It was January 27, the day after Mayor Carlos Gimenez announced he would cooperate with Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, and emotions were running high. The idea that residents…
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…
