Miami’s Crony Corporatist Expansion is a Warning of America’s Feudal Future
Sex Trafficking, Middle Class Displacement, and Rising Socialism are the Price of New York-style "Growth" in the GOP's Favorite City
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
For a Republican in 2025, there seems to be no better city to live in than Miami. Seventy miles from Mar a Lago, it is among the largest Republican-voting metropolitan areas in America. It is also one of America's most Christian cities, and its Cuban-American community has never had more influence: Marco Rubio, who grew up in the city and met his wife there, is only the second Secretary of State in history to also serve as National Security Adviser. Miami political organizers and influencers turn up in the White House briefing room. Presidential confidantes come to events thrown by the Miami Young Republicans.
Five months ago, Saudi Arabia announced that it would open its second American investment office in Miami—two days after President Trump attended the Saudis' Future Investment Initiative Institute Priority Summit Miami 2025. Two months ago, CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference), sponsored a retreat in Miami in partnership with Latino Wall Street to float the promise that Miami will be where "wealth meets freedom." Indeed, Miami is aiming to be the conservative version of New York, a prospect which, given the city's recent swing Right and its emphasis on crime prevention and business growth, seems a real possibility.
And yet, in Miami as with many places, what one sees is not quite what one gets. The city is a hub of growth, but increasingly to the benefit of wealthy outsiders at the expense of the communities that make their lives here. Indeed, if this is the new Miami, only a diminishing number of its inhabitants can afford to live in it. Far from providing an alternative to cities like New York, Miami in this schema is on the path to becoming them. It is experiencing the accelerating decline that flows from the gradual buildup of concentrated political and economic power which leads, eventually, to the socialist response we are seeing elsewhere.
Sex Trafficking in Miami…
On March 7 of this year, the Miami Herald released a report on the recent arrest of Carleana Garcia-Garcia, 24, and Carlos Medina Puche, 24, a Venezuelan couple running a human trafficking operation in Miami. According to The Herald, the escort whose arrest "broke" the case had been recruited by Garcia-Garcia "from her hometown in Venezuela," a country where the average worker makes $200.00 per month, to come to Miami Beach, where $4,000.00 a month is the average one-bedroom rent. In this new world, the escort had charged $300 per client, while Medina Puche "controlled the victim's pricing . . . took half of her earnings immediately after each meeting," and "physically assault[ed] Garcia-Garcia," which made the escort "worried he would become violent with her as well." The escort told detectives she came to fear leaving the operation, believing Garcia-Garcia and Medina Puche would harm not just her but her family in Venezuela.
It might be easy to put this tragedy down to illegal immigration, but what happened on March 7 in Miami Beach is not an unusual experience in Miami regardless of citizenship. Last November, the week before Thanksgiving, The Herald reported on a sex ring broken up at 485 Brickell Avenue, the address of the Icon Building, one of the city's most venerable residential apartment complexes. Searching for a missing local teen from the suburbs, police ended up at an apartment unit in the building which housed two women in their twenties who exited the unit, told police that the kidnapper of the teen "was in the apartment and armed," and, as "a standoff ensued for several hours . . . told police that he [had] used physical violence to force them into prostitution and then kept all the money that was made."
The next month, December, a higher-profile arrest occurred: The Miami Beach real estate brokers Oren, Tal, and Alon Alexander, for sex trafficking and sexual assault charges over fifteen years. During this period, they had been fixtures on the local Miami scene as the city boomed with luxury building, "spotted regularly on private jets and super yachts" and "in supercharged sports cars." According to the indictment, the brothers, whose "considerable social and financial connections" came
through [their] positions as prominent real estate agents focused on ultra-luxury markets . . . used their wealth and prominent positions in real estate to create . . . the promise of luxury experiences, travel, and accommodations to lure and entice women to [trips and] events, and then—on multiple occasions—forcibly raped and sexually assaulted women who attended . . . .
…and its Spread
These are not the only incidents. In September of 2024, there was the arrest in Miami Beach of "Robert Brown, 37, from Great Britain," on, among other charges, "human trafficking, deriving support from the proceeds of prostitution" and "aggravated assault with a deadly weapon." This litany had begun six months before, in March, when Brown "responded to [the] online advertisement" of a sex worker, "paid her $150 for full-service sex," and then took up permanent residence in her residence, "not contribut[ing] any money to the household" but acting as an all-around facilitator, for example "text[ing] the client from those responding to ads." He also, when necessary, played the part of a tough, as when "a client paid her via a cash app and then canceled the transaction" and Brown "used a computer to research the male and called him and threatened to call his family if he didn't resubmit the payment." According to the article, this arrangement, with Brown-as-live-in-pimp, may not have been consensual: "The woman also said Brown was physically violent with her and 'would snap anytime he felt disrespected'" and "provided detectives with videos and photos that showed her injuries."
Earlier in 2024, in April, there had been the arrest of the man trafficking a 31-year old victim with "physical and cognitive disabilities" at "a downtown Miami hotel. A year and two months later, in June 2025, there was the bust of three women at two massage parlors in the city that doubled as sex lounges. Before any of these, in March 2024, had come the report that Miami was "mentioned 66 times in [the] upcoming Diddy Suit" for sexual misconduct (Diddy was later convicted of prostitution-related crimes but found not guilty of sex trafficking.) According to this report,
[A]n updated 98-page . . . complaint against Combs and several codefendants, including Combs's son and actor Cuba Gooding Jr . . . claims Combs's $20 million [Miami Beach] home hosted drug-fueled sex parties with sex workers. It says women were sometimes recruited by Jones from the Booby Trap on the River . . . It goes on to list at least eight alleged sex workers who visited the Star Island home 32 times between November 2022 and May of 2023.
And there are more reports besides these. Currently, South Florida generally and Miami-Dade County in particular make up the third largest hub of human trafficking in the country; a problem that flows not just from illegal immigration, but also from the skyrocketing demand that is the byproduct of uncontrolled growth and the new arrivals growth brings.
Homelessness and Crime…
Indeed, as Restoration News has reported, the Miami in which this abuse is occurring is undergoing intense modernization. In both lower income areas like Miami Gardens and Sweetwater and in areas like Coral Gables, where the median income is $120,000.00, neighborhoods and family businesses and several story dwellings are disappearing or being hemmed in. In their place are glass apartment towers with Home Depots or Whole Foods or Chases on their ground floors, fronted by landscaped "recreation spaces" which double as spaces for electronic surveillance.
Restoration News and other conservative outlets have shown how this modernization is integrally connected to displacement, particularly of older Miamians—most recently the 3,000 mostly senior citizens forced to vacate their longtime homes between November 2024 and May 2025 because they were renting the ground underneath them which its owner slotted for redevelopment. According to the Miami Herald, "people 65 and older constitute 14% of Miami-Dade's . . . homeless population" and that number is predicted "to grow to 22% by 2030." The County has responded with laws banning public sleeping and pushing for more sheltering for the homeless, which has allowed the County, this year, to claim an 11-year low in homelessness. But this is a figure which conceals rather than solves a growing problem, since
The 11-year low only refers to the number of unsheltered homeless people in Miami-Dade. The thousands of people who couch-surf, sleep in their cars or live at homeless shelters aren't included.
Many of these people are young as well, and increasingly, in response, turning to crime. The complaints begin with homelessness, and continue with prostitution, but they don't end there. It is not just "people defecating on the street, stuff thrown across the way, peeing on the sidewalks" but more serious offenses like stalking and assaults. All of this amounts to "a decay," in the words of one resident, "in your ability to walk down the street and feel comfortable."
…and their Increase
Indeed, a scan of a neighborhood chat board turns up these not-uncommon verdicts on Brickell, the city's financial center often called the "Manhattan of the South" and purportedly a main beneficiary of Miami's boom:
Just a cluster of tall business buildings (really scary if you think in strong hurricane season), flooding streets (reason why all buildings are built high), over expensive and over rated…homeless population is growing on its streets and in main Brickell Avenue! Even the mall isn't special at all!!
Overly crowded, dog crap every street corner, bums hanging out at bus stops, lots of posers/Only Fans/seeking sponsor types, lots of overpriced mediocre restaurants, always reading about some suicide jumper from a high rise who gets caught up in the Miami hype, narrow sidewalks with food robots and more.
Along with Brickell's decline is the decline of Miami Beach, where, for more than five years, middle class business and home owners have been displaced by large-scale developments. This, in turn, has corresponded with rise in homelessness and homelessness deaths and a rise in crime (the highest in the state in 2022) as neighborhoods decline and "spring breakers" drawn by the large-scale developments create chaos. The necessary crackdown on the spring breakers, in turn, hurts the remaining small businesses on the Beach. Sources Restoration News has spoken to have cited marketing scams that have taken root in the "new" Miami Beach, as well as targeted street closures they suspect are meant to squeeze profits from the remaining small businesses so that these businesses then sell out to conglomerates looking to develop the stretch. This is an environment—awash with "new money" and "out-of-towners"—where what happened to the victims of the Alexander Brothers and the prostitute trafficked from Venezuela will happen again and again and again.
The Corporate Players Behind the "New Miami"…
The sources of this environment, as Restoration News and other outlets have also reported, are a handful of real estate and development firms with deep connections to the city and county governments of Miami and Miami-Dade which have been driving growth for 15 years. Leading some of these firms are major donors to centrist Republicans and Democrats: People who benefit from Washington doing business as business has mostly been done these past thirty years. This means, as Restoration News has reported, the steady flow of money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to Miami in the name of addressing housing shortages that do not actually address them, but instead benefit the upper-middle income earners increasingly making Miami their home. But it also means other kinds of corruption: Not direct from government but indirectly underwritten by government via corporations and wealth funds government supports.
The steamrollers for this type of growth are conglomerates with ties to America's defense apparatus like Amazon and Citadel, both involved in projects to remake Miami; and their owners, Jeff Bezos and Ken Griffin, who, along with other billionaires, have relocated to the city, where he grew up but then left for New Jersey and Washington state. Other drivers are the United Arab Emirates and the Saudi Public Investment Fund. The latter, the Saudi Fund, holds a fifteen percent stake in Related Company, which in turn is headed by Stephen Ross, the New York developer whom Restoration News has reported on who is helming a project to remake South Florida into a rival to New York.
Brightline, the private high-speed South Florida Metro-rail which has opened up tourism into Miami from Orlando, is headed by the former CEO of the recently constructed flagship Saudi "entertainment city" and tourism destination, Qiddiya. It is backed by Fortress Investments, which had as a main investor the Saudi Public Investment Fund and continues to do business with the United Arab Emirates. Just as Related Company has been accused of de facto decimating Midtown West New York and replacing the possibility of genuinely affordable neighborhoods with luxury brand stores and upper-income apartments, Fortress has been accused of using Brightline to benefit shareholders at the expense of Floridians. (Indeed, "critics of Brightline have theorized that if the passenger service fails," which seems likely since ridership is at only half of projected levels, "a Fortress [Investment Group] subsidiary will still have made money on real estate deals surrounding the train tracks…but bondholders could be left holding the debt.")
All of these players, in one way or another, are floating atop American military spending, the one global constant since the 1940s. The arms sales that have made American weapons contractors rich and the military deployments that have made America's empire run have lowered a security blanket over the Middle East. This in turn has allowed them to invest in modernization projects, via wealth funds or connected corporations, in their own countries and in America. As a result, the same authoritarian forces remaking Dubai and Riyadh into what observers call feudal cities of rich and poor are also remaking Miami and West Palm Beach, at the expense of many of the same classes of people in many of the same ways.
…and the Politicos Fronting for Them
The politicians backing this growth in Miami span the cultural gamut: They are progressive and traditionalist, proudly Christian conservative and proudly pro-LGBTQ+. Democratic Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava spent the Biden Administration shepherding "affordable housing" funds for projects that were far from actually affordable off of her connections to Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge. Republican Miami mayor Francis Suarez, employed by a law firm which does regular business with the Saudis, speaks regularly of a city that will thrive based on aerial drones and real estate development while leveraging its connections to the Middle East to become the center of capital flow in the world.
Miami is, politically, a small city, controlled by the same families for the past forty years. Suarez's father was the city's first Cuban-born mayor in the 80s and 90s; the long-serving States Attorney, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, followed in the footsteps of her father, a powerful judge; and Jorge Mas, the most powerful native-born billionaire in Miami, inherited the business, MasTec, from his father, Jorge Mas Canosa, its most powerful political force from the 1970s to the 1990s. Daniella Levine Cava is a New York transplant but several of the members of the Miami-Dade County Commission, which governs the county with her, are members of local political dynasties as well.
Many of the earlier generations of Cuban American Miamians spent their careers partnering with the CIA to run missions against Castro while storming Miami's old-money Anglo financial and political citadels, making Brickell and Miami Beach and Coral Gables Cuban. The children see themselves as accomplishing that task at the next level—making Miami into a "global city" with connections to the power players of American empire—and have been at work on it since the early 2000s. This makes them the latest players who perceive America's military corporate apparatus as terrain to be conquered even as that complex captures them—since the price of dealing themselves in is welcoming forces which destroy the community which has supported them.
Can Uncontrolled Growth be Stopped…
Restoration News has talked to multiple players in Miami who are tied, in one way or other (real estate, law, politics, administration) to the boom underway. Very few are happy about what is happening, and very few think that anything can be done about it. "At some point, we just have to stop people coming," is the line of one, who actively profits from the expansion. "Older parents are moving in with children; the children's children aren't moving out; there are 10 people in some houses and no one's writing about it," says another. "Everybody knows it's a problem, but there's too much money involved," is the explanation of a third.
"If you're in your thirties and want a white picket fence and a lawn, this is the wrong place for you," says a fourth, "Get out." A fifth talks about rising property valuations thanks to growth, and growing city government to meet the needs of new arrivals, and the rising property taxes that will inevitably follow along with displacement of older citizens who can't pay them. The default position, expressed by more than one, is that only a natural disaster on the level of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which wiped out some of the County, can solve the problem.
Seemingly, the only political force capable of correcting Miami's growth is the one helping underwrite it: Namely, the federal government. As Restoration News has written, key to any project to slow growth is changing the definition of affordable and mixed-income housing so that it actually benefits the people it's supposed to benefit. Equally key is to remove perverse tax incentives for connected developers to build without providing for communities they are displacing. Finally, there is the project of tackling concentrated corporate power. This involves requiring any project receiving federal funding or tax breaks to have competitive bids, and it involves antitrust: Breaking up the politically-tied conglomerates that dominate development at the expense of public oversight.
…and What Happens if it Can't be?
The fallout from this development, if it isn't stopped, will be a city where what happened to the unnamed escort imported from Venezuela and the women picked up by the pimp in Brickell and victims of the Alexander Brothers in Miami Beach is the norm, built into the terms of its functioning. The victims will be the people who create the lower rung of the feudal city, the "service providers" for the elite: People whose parents could afford houses in Miami but have fallen behind on their property taxes and are out on the street in the cold looking for any way to survive. This is how a Gomorrah gets created in a Christian city committed to unregulated growth.
And what happens after Gomorrah? Judging by New York, what comes next in response to corporate socialism is political socialism. In fact, this is, ironically, what is already occurring in Miami, this most anti-communist of American cities—a rise since the late 2010s of actual socialism by young people who feel they have no stake in a city which is pricing them out. According to the Miami Herald, in a 2020 piece on the topic:
Common among Miami DSA members is the belief that — despite the adverse emotional reaction the socialism label triggers — South Florida's economic stratification should make more people receptive to a socialist message anchored on working-class solidarity than is currently the case. Greater Miami — where 30 resident billionaires live alongside widespread poverty and a shrinking middle class — is the second-most unequal metro in the country, trailing only New York. By a standard measure of economic inequality, the Gini coefficient, the gap between the haves and have-nots in Miami-Dade appears to be on par with that of countries like Colombia and Panama.
This trend has only picked up since. According to the Herald, in a piece published in May, 2025:
Millionaires are flocking to Miami faster than any other major metropolitan area in the country, save the Bay Area, a new report reveals. From 2014 to 2024, the Miami area's millionaire population nearly doubled, ballooning by 94% to nearly 39,000 people…
Covering Up Growth's Fallout—and the Reason for the Coverup
Why aren't these developments first tier news items? Why are the headlines of major media about development in Miami, as in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, mostly about development's upside? Why, when a downside is mentioned, is it done in passing in a single article, and treated not as a structural flaw in these cities' models but as a "challenge" of growth?
The answer is straightforward. Established media has, in the past year at an ever-accelerating rate, united into a lockstep to encourage just this sort of growth. As a coming Restoration News report will show, this silence is part of a trend. American political and corporate leadership is doubling down on authoritarian modernization, and major establishment media outlets are following this lead.