Miami Beach’s affordable-housing crisis is nothing new, and its elected officials know that. Seven years ago, the city adopted an ambitious plan to create at least 16,000 new affordable units by 2020. But last summer, commissioners admitted there was no way the city could hit that goal and voted to extend the deadline and reduce the goal to only 6,800 affordable units.
As the medical marijuana market continues to bloom around the Sunshine State, Curaleaf, one of South Florida’s main cannabis providers, is about to open the state’s first drive-thru pot dispensary.
At the end of Charles Avenue in the West Grove sits a freshly painted two-story house with white wooden siding and lemon-yellow trim. On a chain-link fence out front, a graffiti-covered cloth banner proclaims, “Historic ‘Stirrup House’ Bed and Breakfast: Coming soon.”
Living in a home with more than one room shouldn’t really be considered a luxury in 21st-century America. The richest nation on the planet certainly has the resources to make sure single working parents or janitors on 12-hour shifts aren’t forced to live in hovels. Yet here we are: The nonprofit National Low-Income Housing Coalition released a report yesterday titled “Out of Reach,”…
The mansion’s owners, with an eye on Little Haiti’s impending development, are looking to sell the haunted property.
If you ask a random visitor to name five things Miami is famous for, “nice restaurants” is bound to make the list. There’s a reason rich people hang out here, after all. No one is laying out $3 million for a beachfront condo if they have to eat dinner at Denny’s on a Friday night.
By nearly every metric, Miami-Dade County is one of the most difficult places to live if you don’t make a ton of money. The county’s median income is a staggeringly low $44,000, compared to the $80,000 median income in a comparably expensive city such as Seattle. That means Miamians wind up spending a higher percentage of their incomes on rent than residents of any other city in America.
This month, the City of Miami rolled out a plan to “clean up” blighted areas — by bulldozing homes the city says are “drug dens” and “harboring illegal activity that is concerning to neighbors.” New City Manager Emilio T. Gonzalez trumpeted the urban-renewal plan Safe City at a March 15 news conference while a backhoe plowed through a derelict, 92-year-old Little Havana home behind him.
On a frigid night in January, blue and purple lights strobed onto hundreds of amped-up faces in a dark club in downtown Miami. As an EDM version of “Don’t Stop Believin'” pulsated from the speakers at E11even, burlesque dancers in flapper costumes shimmied on two stages. Men dressed in tailored…
For those trying to find affordable housing in Miami Beach, it’s been a long wait: More than 500 households have been on the city’s waitlist since 2015, while the Beach’s nonprofit affordable-housing provider has 1,200 people in its backlog.
The City of Miami Beach admitted last year that asking local developers to build affordable housing for poor and working-class people had totally failed over the past decade. But the effects of that failure on local residents haven’t been completely clear — until now, and the results seem bleak.
The nation’s affordable-housing woes are, at their root, a problem of allocating resources. The richest nation in the history of the world absolutely has enough supplies and space to ensure that every person or family has a usable, affordable home. But that’s not the world we live in: Instead, poor people…
Many Little Haiti residents already have indigestion over the 45,000-square-foot Magic City Innovation District proposed for their neighborhood. In 2016, developers announced plans to build a gigantic, “walkable campus” smack in the middle of the area, along NE Second Avenue from 60th to 64th Streets.
This week, Publix responded to pressure from LGBTQ groups and agreed to provide “pre-exposure prophylactic” (PrEP) preventative HIV medications for employees. But the Fortune 100 supermarket chain still has a long way to go to combat its reputation as a hostile place for gay workers. Take former employee Juan Pastran,…
Publix remains one of the most popular and beloved retail chains in the entire South, despite the fact that the Fortune 100 corporation has been repeatedly accused of mistreating its LGBTQ workers. The chain has been fighting anti-gay accusations for years — but instead of working to rid itself of…
HIV-positive activist Josh Robbins first warned in November 2016 that Publix, Florida’s beloved supermarket giant, was refusing to provide its workers with drugs that prevent HIV transmission. Nearly a year and a half later, the grocery chain has still not answered why it has adopted this health-care policy…
In 2015, residents living near Lake Carmen, a manmade body of water in unincorporated Northwest Miami-Dade, complained that a landowner had tried to fill in the lake with toxic soil, which included traces of reclaimed asphalt, tile, lead, arsenic, and petroleum. But the county’s Department of Environmental Resources Management (DERM) says it’s…
Overtown residents were already worried about the proposed Miami Innovation District and the under-construction Miami WorldCenter, both of which cross into the historically black neighborhood. The once-segregated area has been systematically destroyed by terrible urban planning for decades. Now locals worry that without better regulations, the new buildings will drive up real-estate prices and push out longtime residents.
Amazon has narrowed its list of cities for a second headquarters to 20, and amazingly, Miami is there along with New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Austin, and Atlanta.
An average renter household in the Magic City needs $1,558 saved to break even after the holidays.
Miami TV montages always contain the same few shots: people sunning themselves on South Beach, clubgoers waving their arms in the air, old Cuban men in newsboy hats drinking cortaditos, and maybe a slow-motion shot of a crawling Rolls-Royce or some drone footage of an alligator.
Ditech, one of America’s largest home-loan companies, achieved fame in the 1990s with TV commercials that showed its competitors complaining they had “lost another loan to Ditech.” The company largely vanished during the 2008 housing crisis but has since rebounded and remains one of the largest mortgage service firms in America. It brings in revenues in excess of $1 billion per year and handles thousands of home-foreclosure cases annually.
