Adiel Alexis Benitez

Priced Out of Paradise: Reconsidering Cooperatives in Response to Climate Gentrification in Miami’s Communities of Color

Adiel Alexis Benitez Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw Readers: Marisa Morán Jahn, Susanne Schindler

Our current global health crisis has clearly rendered how a lack of stable housing, access to care, and the effects of climate change, disproportionately affect our communities of color. Contemporary development patterns demonstrate the inadequacies of unchecked neoliberalism, and its adverse effect on the development of equitable housing. Within this context, Miami presents itself as a vulnerable coastal city exemplar. A growing city, Miami struggles with an endemic affordability crisis, and the long lasting scars of segregation, redlining, and urban renewal in its most vulnerable communities. Today, the city’s muddled past has been compounded with its uncertain future.

Despite palpable climate change, construction continues along the Miami waterfront, fueled by foreign investors who park capital in luxury real estate. For local residents, both low and mid income, the cost of

living continues to rise along with sea levels. Miami, outwardly marketed as a tropical oasis, is now regarded as one of the country’s most inequitable cities.

This thesis takes issue with the commodification of

housing, and its adverse effects on the vulnerable communities of greater Miami. While Miami’s surplus of luxury real estate swells, climate change and speculative development have combined to threaten the stability of the city’s multi-ethnic core.

Instead, it re-considers the cooperative as a mechanism by which communities can reclaim agency within hostile markets, and open up access to stabilize housing in

response to climate gentrification, as well as opening up access to other forms of social and financial capital. This thesis works to re-contextualize the cooperative ownership of housing within the Miami context, considering its deployment as an architectural response who’s programming and spatial organizations respond to both collective use and collective need.

Image 1 (Opposite): Speculations on cooperative living, cyanotype 9x12” .

Image 2 (Right): Our Communities, Not for Sale, cyanotype 12x9” . Both images are courtesy of the author.