Miami Forum Addresses Neighborhood 'Desolation'

Laura Flanders, Media Consortium

OneWorld.net note: Last weekend, Miami residents gathered for a town hall style forum to discuss how the national housing crisis and local housing inequalities are translating into "hard times" for the Magic City.

Hard Times in the Magic City: A homeless man prepares a sign in South Beach. © Bill Edwards (flickr)This week, a national bi-partisan commission began a cross-country investigation into the current state of U.S. housing. Co-chair of the commission, former Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, cited "rampant discrimination" as a significant factor contributing to housing inequalities across the nation. The committee will hold hearings in five different cities and intends to highlight regional challenges such as the effect of housing discrimination on children.
In 2006, members of the project "Take Back the Land" created a shantytown called Umoja Village for Miami residents who had nowhere else to live. The group hoped to illustrate the need for community control over local housing issues. Umoja Village, which held over 30 full-time residents, burned down in April 2007. The founder of Take Back the Land, Max Rameau, was a member of the forum at the Lyric Theater meeting.
The Knight Foundation, a philanthropic foundation with a Miami community program, has committed more than $18 million to help revitalize Overtown. An internal assessment by the organization stated that, in the field of housing, "Although nearly 500 units of affordable housing were completed, rebuilt or refurbished using Knight funds, the total is well below aspirations." Other problems with the Foundation's strategy included a flawed top-down strategy, staffing and financial problems faced by local nonprofits, and difficulties dealing with local bureaucracy.

Ground Zero of the Housing Crisis: Report from Miami

From: The Media Consortium

As the Bush administration unveiled a publicly-financed plan to "save" mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, local residents at a town hall forum in Miami were calling for criminal prosecutions of the loan-shark mortgage brokers and investment firms that profited from poor people's housing despair.

It would be hard to think of a better place to hold a public forum on the housing crisis and and sustainable development than Overtown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Miami, Fla. While Overtown is just minutes from downtown geographically-speaking, it's worlds apart economically and culturally.

On Saturday, The Lyric Theater, was host to the second of the five part nationally broadcast town hall series, Live From Main Street. Hundreds of community members gathered to talk about how massive foreclosures, bad loans and gentrification had impacted their city--and what could be done about it in a town hall forum dubbed, "Magic City; Hard Times."

Laura Flanders welcomes over 200 Miamians to Live From Main Street: a town hall on the economic crunch, the housing crisis and building a sustainable city.

Miami is widely known as for the national housing crisis. "Miami's the canary in the coal mine of our economy," Gihan Perera, Executive Director of the Miami Workers Center told the engaged crowd. "In terms of rich vs. poor, uneven development, the impact of global trade and immigration: Miami is the cutting edge," Perera added.

And the Lyric Theater, once at the heart of what was called the Black Broadway, is right where that edge cuts.

Over-shadowed now, literally, by the vast condominium skyscrapers rising over downtown, the Lyric, founded in 1915 by a wealthy businessman (who was part of a large middle-class Black Miami community in the first half of the 20th century,) was almost destroyed in the 1960s when developers BUILT a highway through these parts. From "the Harlem of the South," the area became, "Overtown," a community the road drove over – and into destitution.

Today, the Lyric survives thanks to money from the local redevelopment council, but the neighbors are worried that "development" for others will steal the last land they've got.

"You can understand why gentrification's a threat," Denise Perry of Power U – a community empowerment project based in Overtown, one of the Live From Main Street panelists told me after the event. "In the 1960s developers had a choice whether to build the road near the water, nearer downtown, or smack through a thriving black community – and they chose the last."

Gihan Perera, Executive Director of the Miami Workers Center talks with Laura Flanders about why the rest of the country needs to pay attention to what's happening in Miami.

The desolation of neighborhoods is a pattern that has rippled across this country. But where is the national media's coverage? Well, here's a typical newspaper headline from the past the weekend, "Which Candidate will Benefit from the Housing Flap?" A quarter of a million foreclosures in June is hardly a "flap." And which politician will gain advantage is hardly the most important point.

This is exactly that sort of reporting which Live From Main Street puts into harsh relief. At the Lyric, tenant organizers, green builders, political advocacy groups and Miami residents (on the stage and off) got a chance to speak. Latasha Jones, a tenant organizer in Liberty City and panelist on Saturday, lives in an apartment with no hot water and leaks in her roof. The families she knows didn't walk willingly into sub-prime mortgages. Miami currently has four people waiting for each of the city's 10,000 units of public housing. Jones herself is on that waiting list.

''I've spent about 13 years on the waiting list for public housing,'' Jones told the Miami Herald, one of several local media outlets that came to Overtown, drawn by the national event.

Miami is the epicenter of the housing crisis. Watch Miami grassroots leaders come face to face with Countrywide Mortgage for a heated conversation on the housing crisis. In order of seating-host Laura Flanders, Cheryl Mizell (LFMS co-host and of WEDR/ 99 JAMZ), Max Rameau Founder/ Author Take Back The Land, Latasha Jones (Miami Workers Center) Darin Woods (Countrywide Mortgage Sales Manager) and Denise Perry (Director of the Power U Center for Social Change).

At the same time, local residents are entering into bad loans due to shady mortgage practices by lenders or because their only other option was homelessness. Do you think it's fair that "relief" for the profit-makers should come from public coffers (which are already slashing public services) while immense profits remain in private hands? Darin Woods, a financial advisor from Countrywide Home Loan – got an earful from his critics at LFMS where he appeared as a panelist, but, he concluded, "[Live from Main Street] is just the sort of forum we need more of." (Florida's Attorney General joined the AG's of three other states in suing Countrywide for deceptive practices July 1.)

The presidential candidates are unlikely, ever, to talk about today's housing crisis and sustainable development in a place like Overtown.

"That's why we're here," said Tracy Van Slyke, director of The Media Consortium, a network of some 45 national, independent media outlets, which is the producer of Live From Main Street. "Live From Main Street's goal is to tell real stories from real people about the issues that effect their communities, and our country, during this election season. We're cutting through political spin and horserace coverage." Pooling resources (as the Consortium has, to make LFMS possible) and working together, independent media can bring national attention to places like Overtown, and put key issues into national context.

Live From Main Street panelists explores why affordable green housing is good for the environment and for building a sustainable Miami. In order of Seating- Host Laura Flanders, Cheryl Mizell (LFMS co-host and of WEDR/ 99 JAMZ), Sonia Succar (Chairperson of Emerging Green Builders of South Florida) Edith McClintock (Executive Director of Dream in Green) and Gihan Perera (Executive Director of the Miami Worker's Center).

There will be more. LFMS is a five-part series, taking place in five states in five months in the run up to November. The first event occurred June 7 in Minneapolis. The next will be in Denver, at the start of the DNC. After that, the project goes to Columbus, OH, where the topic will be voting, and finally Seattle, where the producers are convening an all–female panel to talk about national security.

Live From Main Street is a production of the Media Consortium with GRITtv.org. Portions of the program will appear on GRITtv this Thursday, July 17th, and on both satellite networks – Dish Network, CH. 9415 (Free Speech TV ) and Direct TV (Link TV) later this week.

This is a community-supported reporting project (made possible also with funding from the Wallace Global Fund and the Arca Foundation.)

Together, we really can make a new media world.

Laura Flanders is the host of Live From Main Street and the daily news and culture program, GRITtv with Laura Flanders. Watch GRITtv on Free Speech TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415) or at GRITtv.org.

To read more about Live From Main Street, visit Laura Flanders' blog.