Federal Funding For "Affordable Housing" Is Displacing Working Class Minorities of the New Republican Coalition: The Situation in Miami-Dade
Sweetwater, Florida - One problem with trying to raise opposition to federal funding is that it’s hard to trace bureaucratic causes to human effects. That’s not the case this month in the city of Sweetwater, part of the greater Miami metropolitan area in Miami-Dade County. Here, in a neighborhood where glittering Christmas lights overlap with “Trump/Vance” signs in a county which Trump carried with 55% of the vote, and a state he carried with 56%, around 3,000 people are about to be displaced due to the Washington bureaucracy that Trump ran against. Matters are so bad that talk is that Washington might have to solve the homelessness problem that it helped to cause by using FEMA—an unsettling thought now that we know how FEMA treats Republican voters.
The formal displacer is Raul F. Rodriguez of CREI Holdings, the owner of Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park in Sweetwater, founded by his father, a Cuban immigrant who had grown up in a mobile home himself. But bigger forces are also at play. The main one is amped-up federal funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to Miami-Dade County, justified because of the seemingly endless and mostly better-off new arrivals escaping failing Democrat cities in New York, Illinois and California. New developments have to be built to house them, sometimes by tearing down buildings, and housing also has to be provided for the working and middle class locals that they are displacing. These new arrivals drive up general costs as well as property taxes, which pushes more locals out and raises the demand for cheaper housing s.
Enter “affordable housing,” which, like “diversity” and “ equity,” is a helpful-sounding phrase that benefits bureaucrats, Democrats, and the better-off. Not surprisingly, in Miami-Dade, “affordable housing” is allowing federal money to flow to citizens who need it the least , even as it supports the projects of well-placed contractors and government bureaucrats . The people most hurt by the funding, in the meantime, are like those in Sweetwater: working class people with nowhere to go. The specifics of the crisis this Christmas in Sweetwater give a sense of just what’s being lost, and why, and what it might mean for Miami-Dade.
A Community of Refugees Grows…
Li’l Abner Mobile Home Park in Sweetwater is on the far west side of Miami-Dade County. It runs roughly 13 small blocks North-South between NW 7th Street and West Flagler Street; and two very large blocks East-West between NW 109th Avenue and NW 114 Avenue. Aside from its name, it’s like any other neighborhood. Residents have added concrete siding, tiled walkways, sheltered porches, and even small colonnades to their trailers, making them into houses. The residents tend to be elderly, but their children and grandchildren visit and sit with them on their porches and walk their dogs. There are trees on the streets and plants on the porches which rock in a gentle breeze. People call each other by first name as they walk by.
Read More at The Miami Independent.