Is the new Liberty Square delivering on its promises to public housing residents?
Within a decade, Liberty City will look totally different.
That is by design. A 2016 partnership between Miami-Dade County and Related Urban, the affordable housing arm of Related Group, aimed to redevelop Liberty Square, the first public housing project in the southeastern United States, in order to transform the community. Gone will be the preWorld War II row houses awash in faded yellow, light blue, pink and green that dot portions of the block along NW 62nd Street in Miami. Gone will be the front porches and the open yards. In their place: several three-story buildings have emerged, painted different shades of gray with splashes of the aforementioned colors accented on doors and the facade. So far, three phases of 10 have been completed.
Since 2019, about 226 residents of the former Liberty Square public housing project have moved into the new properties in phases 1-3, according to Related Urban. The $300 million project will eventually feature
640 public housing units while the remaining roughly 1,200 will be a mix of affordable, workforce and market-rate. Rents for non-public housing tenants will range from $1,197 for a onebedroom up to $2,750 for a three-bedroom unit. And though the experiment to see if this redevelopment will be a successful way to move residents out of poverty, some of the public housing tenants who relocated into the units still continue to face challenges in their new environment.
One tenant has persistent leaks. Another tenant’s wheelchair has torn up the unit’s floor. Several tenants complain of mold. Some residents simply feel that they have lost their sense of community. Older residents have raised concerns about using safety, noise and the new appliances. And several tenants expressed concerns about presenting problems to the development’s management, TRG Management, a subsidiary of the Related Group, saying they take a long time to respond. The Herald heard from about
Since the release of the ‘Razing Liberty Square,’ public housing residents have complained about the conditions. Related Urban developers contend the issues represent just a small portion of units.
a dozen residents about Liberty Square who wanted to express their concerns. Many, however, did not want to use their names due to fear of intimidation.
Related Urban says that a lot of the issues that residents are experiencing are standard in new construction and that they have addressed them as they arise.
Individually, the concerns sound pretty manageable.
In aggregate, they point to the growing pains experienced by a community in the midst of a cultural shift that perhaps neither the residents nor the developers of Liberty Square fully understood. A combination of the isolation of the pandemic, poor communication and lack of access to social services likely only aggravated tensions. Then came the documentary that showed life
through the eyes of Liberty Square’s public housing residents.
Related Urban’s Liberty Square is block by block replacing its predecessor, colloquially known as the “Pork ‘n Beans.” The original Liberty Square opened in 1937 as the first public housing project in the southeastern United States. Black Miamians moved into Liberty City’s new housing complex, many glad to abandon their wood framed homes in nearby Overtown with no electricity or running water.
The original 55-acre Liberty Square offered new concrete one and two-story row houses with groomed lawns and fences.
Black Miami historian Nadege Green, said the community offered everything residents needed, providing for the first iteration of a robust live-workplay community. In addition to housing, residents had access to a community-run grocery story, daycare and doctor’s office at a community center.
“This was considered moving on up,” Green said.
The community attracted residents from all over Miami, including the Herald’s first Black female reporter Bea Hines. Hines moved into the community with her family in 1952 when she was 14 years old. In 2019 column, she wrote that back then it was “one of the best places for blacks to live in the city.”
Everything changed in the 1960s. Money dried up and the buildings deteriorated from lack of maintenance. Blame the federal government, Green said, for the poor upkeep. Decades later, during the McDuffie riots in the 1980s, much of the neighborhood went up in flames and businesses went bust. Federal funding failed to reach the community then again too to help it recover. That, plus the influx of crack, led to the surrounding neighborhood of Liberty City becoming a hotbed for crime. A 1994 Herald article stated that the area itself accounted