‘Many broken promises.’ Community needs in the spotlight for stalled Poinciana site
William “DC” Clark stood up at a recent town hall in Liberty City to say the 24 acres of vacant land known as Poinciana Park needed to be a job creator for the largely Black neighborhood if the county finally ends up building something there.
“You see people who don’t look like us in jobs on projects that were created for us,” said Clark, a retired paramedic who recently finished third in the Miami-Dade commission race to represent the Poinciana area. “We need to make sure a large portion of our people get the jobs they deserve.”
With Mayor Daniella Levine Cava as the host, the Feb. 6 meeting in the Gwen Cherry Park basketball courts served as the kickoff to the latest effort to revive one of MiamiDade’s oldest failed projects.
After the riots that followed the 1980 acquittal of white county police officers in the beating death of a Black insurance agent, Arthur McDuffie, businesses on the site burned and the local economy never recovered.
The county purchased the parcels using federal redevelopment funds and launched multiple efforts with private developers and consultants to bring businesses and jobs to the vacant land now called the Poinciana Industrial Park.
“Poinciana is hallowed ground,” said Jason Smith, head of the equity office Levine Cava started after her 2020 election. “It is the site of many broken promises. Some by your county government.”
The Levine Cava administration has been in talks with two development groups for a deal to take control of the land and build a mix of housing and commercial operations there.
The site is a patchwork of 16 county-owned parcels in a five-block area south of Northwest 79th Street, between Northwest 27th and 23rd avenues.
At the meeting, the newly-elected commissioner whose district includes the Poinciana site, Marleine Bastien, said she wants the process to take the time to determine what neighbors want.
“Whatever we build needs to represent your vision and your expectations,” she said. “This is going to be a dialogue.”
The two teams competing for the land are taking steps to get the upper hand and win the support needed to close the deal with
Levine Cava and the 13member County Commission.
The 79th Street Corridor Initiative is an established non-profit hoping to land the development deal for the county-owned site. Until December, the 79th Street group had a contract to provide economic development services for the county-funded 79th Street Community Redevelopment Agency, an entity charged with revitalizing the area that includes the Poinciana site.
The group points to its history helping map out an economic-development strategy for the site as evidence it is ready to meet community needs. “Since 1999, we have developed several community-wide planning documents that outlined specific activities that would spur area revitalization,” reads the group’s latest proposal for a mix of commercial and residential projects on the site.
The group’s rival, a partnership headed by developer Michael Swerdlow, is in talks with a foundation headed by a county administrator who runs the Miami-Dade agency dedicated to improving Black prosperity.
William “Bill” Diggs, director of the MiamiDade Economic Advocacy Trust, confirmed he’s met with Swerdlow about the Foundation for Youth and Economic Development joining the project to serve as a nonprofit housing developer in a project planning about 1,000 affordable-housing apartments. No decision has been made on the foundation’s joining the Swerdlow effort, Diggs said.
“We’ve taken a look at their proposal and we like it,” Diggs said. He called the foundation the charitable arm of the agency he runs, commonly known as MDEAT, and that the nonprofit is seeking revenue sources. “We want to always look at partnerships that make sense.”
The Swerdlow team has also met with Levine Cava’s top political adviser, Christian Ulvert, about hiring him to join the effort, Ulvert confirmed.
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