Connection
Co-opting: Aftermarket alternatives to affordable housing developments in Miami’s communities of color Our current global health crisis has rendered more clearly how care, housing affordability, and the climate crisis disproportionally affect our most vulnerable communities. Within this context, Miami presents itself as a vulnerable coastal city exemplar. A growing and rapidly changing city, Miami is struggling with a widespread housing affordability crisis and an existing housing stock that is at risk to rising seas. Despite palpable climate change, construction continues along the Miami waterfront, and the cost of living continues to rise along with sea levels. Miami is often portrayed as a tropical oasis, but it has slowly progressed to being regarded as one of the country’s most inequitable cities.
Overtown, and Allapattah, all predominantly communities of color, are at risk from these development pressures.
Today, the Miami waterfront is being developed to cater
to wealthy foreign investors who park capital in high-end real estate. Some vacation seasonally or rent out their luxury waterfront apartments, but a large percentage lies vacant for most of the year. Almost half of the residential properties in Miami Dade county? do not have a homestead exemption, further supporting that a large percentage of residential properties serve as second homes. Meanwhile, many locals are struggling for housing stability. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development categorizes households that spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing as rent-burdened. In Miami Dade, 60 percent of renters fall within this cost-burdened category. A predominantly tourism driven economy keeps wages low, intensifying the city’s affordability crisis. While building continues along the city’s most lucrative waterfront properties, development pressures have begun to move westward, away from the coast and toward higher elevation. Previously, urban renewal and the discriminatory redlining practices in the second half of the 20th century pushed African American and Afro-Caribbean communities out of Miami’s growing, predominantly white central business district and burgeoning waterfront. These lower-income communities now find themselves on the city’s highest elevations, situated along Miami’s limestone ridge. These communities are now at risk of a second wave of displacement, as climate change begins to motivate development away from more vulnerable coastal areas like Miami Beach. Today, Miami’s historically diverse neighborhoods are being slowly gentrified and their communities displaced. Households in neighborhoods such as Liberty City, Little Haiti, Little Havana,
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Above Redlining Map, Miami, 1935 - “Redline Map for Miami, Florida,” Digital Public Library of America
Many of these lower-density, primarily residential communities are now being targeted for new development as sea level rise and climate vulnerability worsen. This relationship between elevation, speculative development, and gentrification can be summed up by the term “climate gentrification.” This concept offers a simple “elevation hypothesis,” arguing that real estate at higher elevations in cities at risk for climate change and sea level rise appreciates at a higher rate than elsewhere. As these development trends continue, residents will have little agency to respond. Miami, a traditionally “rent-over-own” city, leaves its residents, especially its low-income residents, vulnerable to market-based spikes and gentrification. The city’s long history of inequity and racialized urban development has compounded with the adverse effects of contemporary development and increasing climate vulnerability.
