Sign of the Times? Little Haiti Residents Worry About Shrinking Neighborhood Borders

Wilkinson Sejour is angry about a sign.

An otherwise unassuming street marker, the City of Miami placard at the southwest corner of NE 68th Street and NE Second Avenue bears a message that rubbed Sejour and his neighbors the wrong way: "YOU ARE NOW LEAVING LITTLE HAITI."

Sejour, a Little Haiti resident and business owner better known by his alias, "Chef Creole," posted a photo of the sign on his Instagram with an incredulous caption: "Wow. I didn't know that Little [Haiti's] end was 68 St. NE 2nd Ave. News to me. I thought it was 84 St."

Reached by New Times on Monday, Miami's District 5 Commissioner Christine King said that the sign was placed at that spot erroneously and would soon be moved. The placard was, apparently, part of an initiative from King's District 5 predecessor Keon Hardemon, who now sits on the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners.

"The community can rest assured that the boundaries of Little Haiti have not changed," King said through a spokesperson.

Though the kerfuffle seems to have been a simple misunderstanding of borders, Sejour and other Little Haiti locals have cause to be wary of encroachment, as Little Haiti is already encircled by hungry developers gobbling up land, and the persistent threat of gentrification.

"The people of Little Haiti are disappearing anyway and those who are left are too old to pay attention to what's going on," Sejour says. "They're steamrolling everything while everyone's got their head in the dirt just trying to survive."

Haitian migration to Miami began en masse in the late 1970s, and by the late 1980s, the Haitian diaspora had formed a significant footprint in the area then known as Lemon City and Little River. In 2016, Miami City Commissioners voted to name the area Little Haiti, officially adopting the name that many had already been using for some time.

Official maps from Little Haiti's 2016 formal designation as a neighborhood show the area stretching north on NE 2nd Ave to the Little River Canal, just south of El Portal. (The errant sign indicated a slash in the neighborhood's area by about 16 blocks.)

The community is on the cusp of major transformation via large-scale developments like the Magic City Innovation District. The project would cover a large swath of Little Haiti, with 2,598 apartment units, 2.34 million square feet of office space, and 432 hotel rooms lined up for development. The construction permit application for the project's first tower, the Parcel 11 high-rise, is under review.

Plaza Equity Partners, a developer and investor in the project, announced in August that it had secured a deal with Miami-Dade County to supply utilities to the Magic City Innovation District.

Project developers have committed $31 million to the Little Haiti Revitalization Trust to support local businesses and redevelopment of the area. To date, they have contributed six million dollars to the trust, in accordance with their agreement with the City of Miami.

But not all of Little Haiti's business owners have been convinced they will share in the prosperity that proponents claim the project will bring.

"I saw gentrification in Brooklyn and the Bronx. When I came back [to South Florida], I saw those same patterns forming in Little Haiti. I know what comes with a quick land grab," local resident Ashley Toussaint told New Times last year when interviewed about her involvement with initiatives to promote local Haitian businesses.

Another planned high-rise project, Sabal Palm Village, would be built where the Design Place apartment complex now stands in Little Haiti. Plans include nearly 3,000 apartment units and another large hotel.

Little River, the neighborhood north of Little Haiti, is seeing a ratcheting-up of development into an entertainment and cultural district, leading some to believe it may become a future Wynwood. On Google Maps, the borders of Little River reach into the official boundaries of Little Haiti, down to NE 62nd street.

With rents and property values already skyrocketing throughout Miami-Dade County and large developments hemming in lower-income neighborhoods, locals like Sejour worry that the writing is on the wall, if not on the sign: "YOU ARE NOW LEAVING LITTLE HAITI."