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Little Haiti is up for grabs. Will gentrification trample its people and culture?
BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI
SEPTEMBER 29, 2019 06:00 AM, UPDATED SEPTEMBER 30, 2019 10:57 AM
- CARL JUSTE
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For two decades, Marie Jefferson scraped out a steady living running a botanica — a distinctly Haitian combination of variety store and vodoun dispensary — in a decrepit shopfront in western Little Haiti owned by Hialeah investors. Then the not-so-invisible hand of the free market that’s stirred up a surge of redevelopment across Miami arrived in long-shunned Little Haiti.
New investors, drawn by cheap land prices, bought the strip of shops on Northwest Second Avenue near historic Edison Middle School, part of a portfolio of 30 Little Haiti properties they acquired for $6.7 million. Before embarking on a badly needed gut renovation, the new landlords cleared out all the tenants, including Jefferson, another botanica and a neighborhood fried-chicken place.
Jefferson and her botanica neighbor, Emilienne Derosiers, were luckier than most merchants displaced by redevelopment. Instead of just giving them the boot, Adar Investments’ principals last year moved both to a set of newly redone shops they own in the commercial heart of Little Haiti, on Northeast 54th Street. It might have been a happy story.
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Like Derosiers, Jefferson says she lost much of her strictly local, walk-in clientele when she made the move three-quarters of a mile to the east, and now business at St. Michel Super Botanica, a marginal enterprise in the best of circumstances, is so slow she doesn’t know if it can survive much longer.
“Rent is up high,” said Jefferson, 62, pointing to the bulging veins in her forehead and speaking in an agitated mix of Creole and English. “I feel stress, terrible. I don’t have enough money.”
Jefferson’s plight encapsulates the trepidation and uncertainty that’s enveloping the neighborhood where she has lived and worked since arriving from Haiti as part of a wave of refugees and boat people four decades ago.
Walk-in clienteles numbers are dwindling and many business owners don’t if they can survive much longer. “Rent is up high,” said Jefferson, 62, pointing to the bulging veins in her forehead and speaking in an agitated mix of Creole and English. “I feel stress, terrible. I don’t have enough money.” Jefferson’s plight encapsulates the trepidation and uncertainty that’s enveloping the neighborhood where she has lived and worked since arriving from Haiti as part of a wave of refugees and boat people four decades ago. Little Haiti is up for grabs. And the future of one of Miami’s poorest, yet most singular and misunderstood, communities hangs precariously in the balance. Customer passes-by after a short visit Marie Desir’s thrift shop where she has lost most of her inventory due to a leaky roof. Carl Juste CJUSTE@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Little Haiti is up for grabs. And the future of one of Miami’s poorest, yet most singular and misunderstood, communities hangs precariously in the balance.
Surrounded by gentrifying neighborhoods like Wynwood, the Design District and the upscale Upper East Side, the centrally located Little Haiti has become a magnet for real estate investors, business owners and speculators looking for opportunities with a low cost of entry and a potentially big upside.
THE SOUL OF LITTLE HAITI: ESSAY BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT
Starved of private investment for decades and isolated from the rest of Miami by language, crime and poverty, an unfamiliar culture and what some in the neighborhood say is racial and ethnic animus on the part of those outside it, Little Haiti desperately needs physical and economic regeneration.
But many in the neighborhood say rising rents and land values represent an existential threat to a vulnerable immigrant enclave. Median household income is a meager $24,800; businesses barely subsist on the narrowest of margins; few residents or merchants own property. Many lack formal education or a command of English.
Investors in some sections of Little Haiti have pushed out small, longtime Haitian commercial tenants, many of whom have no leases. Many have gone out of business or been forced into shaky situations elsewhere.
Sisters Tah’Siah, 13, left, N’Deirah,12, right, pose outside the Little Haiti Cultural Complex’s Caribbean Marketplace while taking a break from helping out at their father’s Via Vegan booth in June. The cultural center and market are a hub of cultural and social activities and tourism in Little Haiti. Carl Juste CJUSTE@MIAMIHERALD.COM
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In an almost-certain sign of rising real estate speculation, a big chunk of the single-family homes and duplexes in the neighborhood are now owned by limited liability corporations with names like Vulture Property Investments, Strictly Profits LLC and World Domination Enterprises. While there is so far little evidence of widespread residential turnover, advocates for Little Haiti residents say it’s only a matter of time. Some 82 percent of Little Haiti residents are renters, according to a report by Florida International University’s Metropolitan Center.
Many fear the pace of redevelopment will only accelerate with the Miami commission’s recent approval of the massive Magic City Innovation District plan, which envisions construction of a nearly 18-acre, high-rise mini-city of apartments, shops and offices in the heart of the low-rise neighborhood.
Debate over the proposal, which bitterly split the Haitian community and played out over months in heated and prolonged Miami Commission hearings and public meetings, coincided with the opening of an upscale food hall, The Citadel, in the northern end of Little Haiti. Its inauguration drew protesters angry that the developers have sought to re-brand its corner of the neighborhood over the past five years as Little River, a historic name that had faded into disuse after Haitian refugees began settling in the area in the early 1980s.
The re-labeling rankles many in Little Haiti who contend the name game exposes developers’ true aims.
“The plan is not to develop Little Haiti, it is to erase Little Haiti,” said veteran Little Haiti activist Marleine Bastien, director of the Family Action Network Movement, of FAMN, headquartered a couple of blocks from The Citadel, and a leading critic of the food hall and Magic City.
To date, the Magic City district’s developers have done little beyond renovating a collection of warehouses on the periphery of their property, most of which remain unleased. And they say they have no plan as yet for the launch of new construction. Some observers believe they won’t be ready to build for several years amid a broader real estate slowdown.
Tony Cho, a broker active in Little Haiti and also a partner in the Magic City venture, blames the loss of Haitian businesses not on their redevelopment plan or investment from outsiders, but on the neighborhood’s sagging economics.
“There is no traffic,” he said.
But many in the neighborhood blame the project for encouraging speculation and inflating rents and real estate asking prices in Little Haiti. Brokers are heavily touting Magic City in ads and brochures for dozens of Little Haiti residential and commercial properties.
“I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of displacement,” said Meena Jagannath, an attorney with the Community Justice Project in Miami, which has represented FAMN in its opposition to Magic City.
Different versions of the story are playing out in several other urban-core neighborhoods in the city of Miami, including historically black Overtown and West Coconut Grove, where substantial displacement and inroads from new development are dramatically evident. Some see rising speculation in East Little Havana, which some real estate brokers have tried to rebrand as West Brickell, though the impact so far appears limited.
Gentrification is a complex process with many critics, who say the poor rarely benefit and are only pushed out. But it has advocates as well. Research is mixed, with some studies showing that longtime property owners can benefit as blighted neighborhoods are revitalized, a process that can broadly improve the quality of life and health of cities.
In Little Haiti, the surge in investor interest has set off a struggle for the soul of the neighborhood. Its many partisans say Little Haiti, as the symbolic center of a vibrant immigrant community famed the world over for its art, music and culture, represents an unmatched value not just for those who live and work in it, but for Miami and South Florida as a whole.
Haitian-born artist Jude Papaloko Thegenus sits in his studio, Jakmel Art Gallery, on the edge of Little Haiti near Miami’s Design District in July. Thegenus, who draws inspiration from his Haitian roots, has had to move his studio several times as affordable spaces become scarce. Carl Juste CJUSTE@MIAMIHERALD.COM
“The soul of Little Haiti is the culture, the music, the food, the dances — all the things we brought with us from Haiti,” said said Jude Papaloko Thegenus, an artist and musician who maintains a studio and gallery in a rented warehouse in a strip once considered part of Little Haiti. That area, abutting State Road 112 just west of North Miami Avenue, has been subsumed by expanding Midtown Miami.
“For Little Haiti to stay Little Haiti, we need to stay around and keep the spirit. When people come here, they need to feel like they are in Haiti. The developers need to meet halfway with the Haitians. They have to make sure it doesn’t lose the essence,” Thegenus said.
Was curious and looked Little Haiti up on the map. Not too far from Miami, right by the ocean, and right by Miami Beach
. Cheap land by the ocean breh? Them whites gonna eat that up real quick.
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