‘There’s no place to move that’s affordable.’ Parents share rent woes with Miami-Dade mayor
While children were downstairs playing house and building wooden train tracks, mothers from across Miami-Dade gathered in a conference room and vented about their affordable-housing struggles.
A childcare worker had to leave her lifelong dream behind to afford her Liberty City rent. Two parents in Homestead found a place to call home, but gun violence in the neighborhood has them carefully plotting when their three children can step outside. And for one Coconut Grove resident, who has lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, rent has nearly doubled since a developer bought her building a year ago.
These are some of the stories that Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava heard Tuesday during a roundtable at United Way’s Center for Excellence in Early Education in Miami. The mayor listened to parents’ housing struggles, provided information about reincrease
sources and brainstormed potential solutions.
In a recent South Florida tour, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge called Miami the “epicenter of the housing crisis in this country.”
“Housing is the number one issue right now,” Levine Cava said. “We are clearly in an affordability crisis. The cost of housing has gone up, making this the least-affordable place in the country, so you’re not alone in this struggle.”
The county is aiming to
supply of workforce housing, tenant protections and quality of housing, Levine Cava said. It will construct 14,000 affordable-housing units by the end of 2023 with another 18,000 to be built thereafter. Miami-Dade Schools also plans to build homes at three of its campuses to rent to teachers and other district employees.
She also noted how the County Commission in May passed the county’s first Tenant’s Bill of Rights, which makes it easier for tenants to bill landlords for repairs and protects tenants from landlords’ retaliation if they report a rental unit’s disrepair to a municipality. The county also has rental-assistance dollars for people facing eviction and a landlord program that gives funds to fix bad units in exchange for keeping rent affordable, Levine Cava said.
However, the county’s 2022 budget needs an additional $400 million to repair and improve its existing stock of public housing. County officials say that money has to come from the federal government.
Parents attending the roundtable were all too familiar with the county’s housing crunch.
Shaqula Parks shared a home with her 12 siblings while growing up. It’s part of what inspired her to pursue childcare. The job also allowed her to keep an eye on her 8-year-old son.
But when her rent soared from $650 a month five years ago to $2,000 a month in 2020, she was
SHAQULA PARKS’ RENT SOARED FROM $650 A MONTH FIVE YEARS AGO TO $2,000 A MONTH IN 2020. SHE QUIT HER JOB AND NOW WORKS FROM HOME AS A SMALL-BUSINESS OWNER SO SHE CAN CARE FOR HER SON.
forced to move out of her Liberty City one-bedroom apartment. She also quit her job and now works from home as a smallbusiness owner so she can care for her son.
Shantay Davis has been experiencing a similar reality in Coconut Grove. Longtime residents of the West Grove — a neighborhood whose roots were planted when Bahamians moved there to help build the city of Miami in the late 1800s — are being pushed out by developers attracted to the relatively inexpensive buildings, tree-lined streets and proximity to downtown Miami.
“It’s like they’re trying to fix up everywhere else to look like CocoWalk, but in the mix of that they are pushing everyone out,” said Davis, who has lived in the Grove for 30 years but whose rent skyrocketed after a developer bought her building last year. She used to pay
$650 a month for her one-bedroom apartment but now pays nearly $1,000 after several rent hikes within the past year.
“A lot of people have been living in Coconut Grove for years,” Davis noted.
What’s happening in Coconut Grove is gentrification, Levine Cava said. The properties are extremely valuable now, and people willing to pay have created demand in the neighborhood.
“People aren’t aware of what’s going on,” the mayor said. “It’s going to destroy history and destroy culture in the neighborhood.”
Davis worries that many of her neighbors can’t afford their rent anymore because they live on fixed incomes.
And, she noted, the new landlord isn’t sprucing up the property with the additional rent revenue.
“There’s nothing different,” she said. “They don’t fix the properties how they should.”
She said she’ll eventually have to move even though the Grove is where her children go to school and have their doctors.
“If I am saving money on rent in a new area, [I] will have to spend more money on transportation,” she said.
SAFETY CONCERNS IN HOMESTEAD
Moving can create other problems.
Lakisha Thomas, 32, moved into her Homestead apartment with her husband and three children a year ago. They were among the first to live in the complex. They moved from Kendall to another Homestead neighborhood, where their cars were continually broken into, leading them to the newer apartment.
But rampant gun violence in the new neighborhood has her fearing for the family’s safety. It’s an everyday problem, she said, with one recent incident leading to 64 gunshots. Ushering her kids out of the car and into the house safely has become a
daily challenge.
“We would like to move, but there’s no place to move that’s affordable,” Thomas said.
She attributes this to gentrification and neighborhoods getting more expensive.
“They’re pushing people out ... and they’re forced to go to areas that are cheaper like Homestead,” she said in an interview with the Miami Herald after the discussion. “But then also people like ourselves who can’t afford to live in a better quality area, we’re forced to live with these type of people because of income restrictions.”
Many of Thomas’ neighbors also want to leave but feel there’s no way out.
“It’s traumatizing,” she said in between tears. “You have to choose between keeping your kids safe and living somewhere you can afford.”