Climate gentrification threatens Miami’s last affordable housing

REVERB is a new documentary series by CBS Reports. Watch “Rising Tide: Priced Out in Miami” on the video player above.

Alba Hernandez lives in one of the few affordable pockets in Miami. She has owned her mobile home in the city’s Little River neighborhood since 2003. When she moved, the rent for the land under her home was $ 245 a month, below what she would pay for an apartment. equivalent to the city.

Hernandez was accustomed to the less than $ 20 a month increases she would get each year. But two years ago, he had a big surprise. The trailer park had a new owner who wanted to increase Hernandez’s rent to $ 700, an increase of almost 50%.

“I can’t find the money right now. That’s impossible for me right now,” said Hernandez, who lives on a fixed income and says medical problems keep him from working.

Hernandez and many of his neighbors in the community of 800 are fighting the rise in the courts. The new owner, Miami SOAR Management Corp., responded by sending more than 100 eviction notices. The case is ongoing and Hernandez said the stress of the owners’ letters twice a week aggravates their health problems.

“We don’t like them. They don’t care about us. They want more money,” he told CBS News.

The scenario is common to many low-income communities in increasingly expensive cities. But in downtown Miami, new homeowners are more than just real estate speculation. It is also the fear of climate change.

The city, whose most exclusive neighborhoods are close to the sea and just above sea level, is increasingly flooded during high tide. The city is moving to increase the streets and sidewalks by about two feet, at a cost of $ 1 million per block, but the adaptation will only be a partial help. Water rises through the ground, permeating the porous limestone on which much of Miami sits. The dikes other cities are considering will not work here.

Increasingly, wealthy residents living near the shores of Miami are looking for another option: moving inland to higher ground, to historically less desirable neighborhoods populated by working-class people.

Even mobile home parks, wherever they are located, are vulnerable to this gentrification.

“You don’t really find mobile home parks in Miami Beach. You find them more inland. And now that developers are looking for long-term development inland, these mobile home parks are vulnerable,” said Nejla Calvo. lawyer representing Hernandez and the other 800 residents of the SOAR mobile home park.

In the last five years, Greater Miami has lost seven mobile home parks, or about 700 housing units, Calvo calculated. One such park is now home to Magic City, a multimillion-dollar development that will eventually include 2,600 homes. Rents for those are not yet fixed.

Mobile home parks are one of the few affordable options in a country you see rising housing costs. In Florida, 1 in 6 homes is a mobile home, Calvo told CBS News.

Despite their name, most mobile homes are stuck to the ground and cannot be moved easily. Therefore, if a landlord loses the land he has been renting, his options are to leave the site and move with relatives to Miami or leave the city altogether, Calvo said.

“Unfortunately, I hope to see more in the coming years because there is a limited amount of space in Miami that can be developed,” Calvo said. “These mobile home parks are in increasingly desirable areas, especially with climate change and flooding and highland areas are becoming more attractive to developers.”

Park owners disagree.

“Only the dirt of the land itself is worth much more than the original owner could have imagined 50 years ago,” said Martin Feldman, a lawyer for Miami SOAR Management Corp. “You’re talking about a million square feet of property. Here.”

The company plans to develop the plot in the next three to four years, building luxury housing along with up to 2,500 affordable housing units, Feldman said. He added that none of the residents of the mobile homes would be forced to move if they did not want to. He also denied that mobile home residents had been evicted, and described eviction notices as a bargaining tactic.

But some park residents, who don’t want to fight rent hikes, have already left, Calvo said. Although about half of the 100 eviction attempts were rejected, about 20 are still pending, he said.

For Hernandez, whose only child lives in Honduras, leaving is not an option, nor is moving to her sister’s full house. They have looked for another place to live, but so far they have been unlucky.

“It’s the same problem,” he said. “Money. Money is a problem in this country.”

In:
• Miami