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My name is Sarahi Perez and I am from a neighborhood between Little Havana and Allapattah. Growing up here allowed me to experience the culture from both places, which played a critical role in forming the person I am today. I have always lived in this area. As a result of this, I attended the nearby private, and religious, K-12 school a couple blocks away. After graduating, I started attending the Miami Dade College Padron campus a couple streets away as a Business Administration student. All my life, I have centered myself around the same area and the same people. Even though I love the memories I have made here, I desire a change of environment. I want to meet new people and explore what the world has to offer me. I'm a strong believer in that the world is too big for me to just stay in one place for the rest of my life. There are future friends to meet, future skills to discover, and future beauties to see. What's held me back in going after this has been my struggle to accept change in my life: that is the reason why I have let myself stay in one place for so long. However, I believe that I am ready to leave and find out more about myself. I want to make my weakness to change become a strength. After all, change is inevitable. What matters is how one accepts and integrates it into their life. This goal of mine is the beginning to my journey of growth. I want my vision of success to include a version of myself that can use change to her advantage. Most of all however, I want to be able to confidently say that I stepped out of my comfort zone.

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Professor Duque's session was helpful and informative in many ways. I was already informed on the MDC database and the features it contains. I attended a summer workshop before the beginning of my first semester in MDC, and she was the one to teach our group how the database works. She is well informed on the topic and explained it easily. Even though I already knew about it, it was nice to be reminded of how many resources are available to us MDC students. I like to rely on outside articles online for my projects, but I need to learn to rely on this database as well. Articles online are not always reliable, but the database ensures to only have reliable articles. As for the question I would like to do further research on, I decided on the following: how is gentrification changing Miami? I believe that recently gentrification has been seen more and more in our local neighborhoods. Many say that it is a good thing as it's been improving the "level of living" there, however, what has gentrification been doing to the culture and families of those neighborhoods? How has it affected housing and Miami as a whole? Gentrification stands at the center of these issues and I would like to explore the topic more to demonstrate its impact and possible solutions.

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Officially, packback is an online, discussion based platform that encourages students to ask and further discuss open-ended questions. It is a platform meant to foster curiosity and thinking in the students that use it. For me, packback is a platform that builds a community. It's interactive, and it allows us to discuss with classmates and students from other areas. It also builds engagement in learning and asking. Ultimately, platform provides a way for students to learn through each other and through their own thinking; they are learning through questioning, even about subjects they never heard about before. It takes the shame of not knowing out of the equation and does the opposite: packback encourages us to learn by questioning and admitting the things we do not know.

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How is gentrification changing Miami's culture?

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How is gentrification changing Miami's culture?

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Gentrification is a phenomenon that many residents of Miami have observed. However, many either choose to ignore it, or not know what to do fight against it. Additionally, Miamians also don't foresee the long-term consequences of such gentrification; one of which is the damage of a town's culture. Residents from Miami and other gentrified areas also don't usually know the different forms gentrification can take. My goal is to educate on this phenomenon and how to advocate against it, especially since it is damaging our current community.

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Source 1: Gentrification in the Heart of Cuban Miami

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Source 1: Gentrification in the Heart of Cuban Miami

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Feldman, Marcos, and Violaine Jolivet. “Back to Little Havana: Controlling Gentrification in the Heart of Cuban Miami.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 38, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1266–85, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12097

In this article, another aspect of gentrification is mentioned. Here, we see how Cuban Americans, a large part of the Miami community itself, have played a direct hand in controlling gentrification in Miami through political power to benefit their community. Miami is a hub for investment because of its marketing and its governing administration, which is also composed of Cuban Americans. This in itself is changing the culture in Little Havana by the day. This article shows that gentrification has different causes and can take on different forms.

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Broder-Singer, Rochelle. "'Fear of gentrification': Overtown leaders welcome redevelopment but fear displacing residents." Florida Trend, vol. 57, no. 10, Jan. 2015, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A443056162/ITOF?u=lincclin_mdcc&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fedfb06c

In this article, the fear of gentrification expressed by the communities affected is demonstrated. It is specifically shown by Overtown in this example. Overtown has already been a victim of culture change through the construction of the I-95. Now, developers state they want to renovate buildings and create condos in the neighborhood. However, even though they want to create housing, and maybe even affordable housing, the residents believe strongly that even that rent will be out of their range. This phenomenon would force them out, creating a new cycle of gentrification in Overtown: a black cultural city. This article helped me see how development can still be an evil for a community.

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Big changes are coming to Miami's historic Overtown neighborhood, but local leaders are trying to make sure that gentrification doesn't overtake the neighborhood's current residents.

Located northwest of downtown Miami, Overtown was a vibrant black community and cultural hub before construction of 1-95 in the 1960s.

Last February saw the reopening of the neighborhood's historic Lyric Theater, which had hosted performances by the likes of musician Duke Ellington, poet Langston Hughes and singer Aretha Franklin, before falling into disrepair. A $10-million makeover of Gibson Park will soon be complemented by another $5 million in improvements, including a gymnasium and classrooms.

Two major developments are set to begin construction soon in the adjacent Parkwest area: All Aboard Florida's MiamiCentral railway station and the Miami Worldcenter mixed-use project.

Developers R. Donahue Peebles and Barron Channer are working on Overtown Gateway, a mixed-use block-size project next to the Lyric Theater. Next door, All Aboard Florida will build its headquarters, as well as other offices and retail. Brazilian developer Rodolfo Ishak plans a 35-story condominium tower. Other business owners are renovating local landmarks such as Old Clyde Killen's Pool Hall and the historic Josephine and Dunn Hotel.

In August, the Southeast Overtown/Parkwest Community Redevelopment Agency closed on a $ 60-million loan to finance several major projects, including 402 new affordable housing units and 21,000 square feet of commercial space in four new mixed-use projects. Clarence E. Woods III, executive director of the CRA, acknowledges that even those affordable rents will likely be out of range of many current Overtown residents. "That's why we're going on an aggressive campaign to rehab existing housing stock," he says.

The loan will also finance the gutting and rehab of 263 units at the Town Park South and Town Park Village affordable housing projects, which will become co-ops, and the Town Park North condominiums. The new developments have land-use restrictions that mandate they remain affordable housing for 50 years. "There's always the fear of gentrification," Woods says. "But we believe we've found a way to kind of bridge redevelopment with not displacing current residents."

By Rochelle Broder-Singer

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'Fear of gentrification': Overtown leaders welcome redevelopment but fear displacing residents

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Big changes are coming to Miami's historic Overtown neighborhood, but local leaders are trying to make sure that gentrification doesn't overtake the neighborhood's current residents. Located northwest of downtown Miami, Overtown was a vibrant black community and cultural hub before construction of 1-95 in the 1960s.

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Source 3: Climate Gentrification in Cultural Cities

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Source 3: Climate Gentrification in Cultural Cities

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Riley, Nano. “Gentrification Strikes Miami’s Little Haiti as Beach Residents Flee Rising Water.” National Catholic Reporter, 21 July 2021, www.ncronline.org/news/earthbeat/gentrification-strikes-miamis-little-haiti-beach-residents-flee-rising-water

Another form of gentrification is explored in this article: climate gentrification. Due to high sea levels near Miami Beach and areas like it, residents from those areas are looking for places that are more elevated to counteract flooding. One of those areas is Little Haiti: a town that carries more than 50 years of culture within it. Because of their elevation, developers have expressed interest in building condos and shops, which has already uprooted many of its residents to find more affordable housing. They are a prime example of a town that is at risk of losing its culture due to climate gentrification, which is another form of gentrification that is often overseen.

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Gentrification strikes Miami's Little Haiti as beach residents flee rising water

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On a sunny June day in Miami, there's not a cloud in the sky, but the streets near the beach are awash with seawater. Small waves ebb and flow...

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Climate Gentrification Impact on Resident Housing

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Climate Gentrification Impact on Resident Housing

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/ CBS News

REVERB is a new documentary series from CBS Reports. Watch "Rising Tide: Priced Out in Miami" in the video player above.
Alba Hernandez lives in one of Miami's few affordable pockets. She's owned her mobile home in the city's Little River neighborhood since 2003. When she moved in, rent for the patch of land under her house was $245 a month - below what she'd pay for an equivalent apartment in the city.

Hernandez was used to the less-than-$20-a-month increases she would get every year. But two years ago, she got a rude surprise. The trailer park had a new owner who wanted to hike Hernandez's rent to $700 - a nearly 50% increase.

"I can't find the money at this moment. That is impossible for me in this moment," said Hernandez, who lives on a fixed income and says medical issues prevent her from working.

Hernandez and many of her neighbors in the community of 800 are fighting the hike in court. The new owner, Miami SOAR Management Corp., responded by sending more than 100 eviction notices. The case is ongoing, and Hernandez said the stress from the twice-a-week letters from the landowners exacerbates her health issues.

"They don't like us. They don't worry about us. They want more money," she told CBS News.

The scenario is a common one in many low-income communities in increasingly pricey cities. But in low-lying Miami, it's more than real estate speculation driving the new owners. It's also the fear of climate change.

The city, whose most exclusive neighborhoods are close to the sea and barely above sea level, is increasingly getting flooded during high tides. The city is moving to raise streets and sidewalks by two feet, at a cost of about $1 million a block, but adaptation will only be a partial help. Water is rising right through the ground, permeating the porous limestone on which much of Miami sits. The sea walls other cities are considering won't work here.

Increasingly, the wealthy residents living near Miami's shores are looking at another option: Move inland to higher ground, to historically less desirable neighborhoods populated by working-class people.

Even mobile home parks, because of where they are, are vulnerable to such gentrification.

"You don't really find mobile home parks in Miami Beach. You find them more inland. And now as developers are looking inland for long-term development, these mobile home parks are vulnerable," said Nejla Calvo, an attorney representing Hernandez and the 800 other residents of the SOAR mobile home park.

In the last five years, greater Miami has lost seven mobile-home parks, or about 700 housing units, Calvo estimated. One of these parks is now home to Magic City, a multimillion-dollar development that will eventually include 2,600 housing units. Rents for those are not yet set.

Mobile home parks are one of the few affordable options in a country that's seen skyrocketing housing costs. In Florida, 1 in 6 housing units is a mobile home, Calvo told CBS News.

Despite their name, most mobile homes are affixed to the ground and not readily moveable. So if a homeowner loses the land they've been renting, their options are to abandon the site and move in with relatives in Miami or leave the city altogether, Calvo said.

"I, unfortunately, expect to see more in the years to come because there's a limited amount of space in Miami that's developable," Calvo said. "These mobile home parks are located in areas that are more and more desirable, especially with climate change and with flooding and areas in Highlands are more attractive to developers."

The park's owners don't disagree.

"Just the dirt of the land itself is worth far more than the original owner could ever have imagined 50 years ago," said Martin Feldman, an attorney for Miami SOAR Management Corp. "You're talking about a million dollars of square foot property here."

The company plans to develop the plot in the next three to four years, building luxury housing along with up to 2,500 units of affordable housing, Feldman said. He added that none of the mobile home residents would be forced to move if they didn't want to. He also denied that mobile home residents have been evicted, describing the eviction notices as a negotiating tactic.

But some residents of the park, unwilling to fight the rent hikes, have already left, Calvo said. While about half of the 100 eviction attempts were dismissed, about 20 are still pending, she said.
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For Hernandez, whose only child lives in Honduras, leaving isn't option, and neither is moving into her sister's already full house. They've looked for someplace else to live, but so far, they've had no luck.

"It's the same problem," she said. "The money. The money is a problem in this country."

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Climate gentrification threatens Miami's last affordable housing

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CBS News REVERB is a new documentary series from CBS Reports . Watch "Rising Tide: Priced Out in Miami" in the video player above. Alba Hernandez lives in one of Miami's few affordable pockets. She's owned her mobile home in the city's Little River neighborhood since 2003.

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How can we prevent or slow gentrification?

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How can we prevent or slow gentrification?

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According to leaders in our communities, it is possible to prevent displacement of long time residents from their homes. Such solutions include passing new residential zoning laws, taxing vacant properties, and organizing residents to pool their capital to buy property. Economic opportunities for growth need to be fostered in low-income areas as well as more affordable housing. After all, when it affects housing and residents' livelihood negatively, it is no longer development, but gentrification.

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When a neighborhood gentrifies, new homes rise, new businesses move in, and property values go up. But longtime, low-income minority residents are also often priced out.

Activists say that changing single-family zoning laws and taxing owners of vacant properties can help to create more affordable, accessible housing.

Empowering residents to "buy back the block" and resist developers is another way to protect existing communities.

This article is part of Business Insider's "Inside the racial wealth gap" series. Read more "

When a low-income neighborhood has been gentrified, it generally means that old buildings have been torn down, new residences have been built, big-name businesses have moved in - and the demographics of the area have changed.

While gentrification may increase property values, it also raises rents and property taxes, pricing longtime residents out of their own neighborhoods, often leading to more white and fewer Black residents. That means less wealth in the hands of Black Americans, who already own just 10% of the wealth of white Americans on average.

The gentrification process may feel inevitable, but it doesn't have to. According to community leaders and housing activists, there are ways to mitigate the harmful effects of gentrification and fight to keep longtime minority residents from being displaced, including passing new residential zoning laws, taxing vacant properties, and organizing residents to pool their capital to buy property.

Preventing gentrification through zoning and other housing regulations

King Williams has seen the consequences of gentrification in urban Atlanta firsthand. He's the director of the documentary " The Atlanta Way," which chronicles the razing of public housing in Atlanta from 2008 to 2010.

Williams told Business Insider that public housing in his city was destroyed at the behest of Atlanta Housing, the local housing authority, which was "trying to remove concentrated poverty in the city."

He said, "This effort really just opened up the most viable areas of the city for development, and pushed poor people to the periphery or relocating in other poor pockets of the city. Most of the people who were able to get a Section 8 voucher moved to other, lower-economic pockets of the city, and the majority of people did not get these vouchers and no data has emerged as to where they went."

To keep residents in their neighborhoods and prevent gentrification, Williams said that cities need to foster economic growth and opportunities in low-income communities, and tear up existing zoning laws. "It would take some serious changing of local zoning ordinances and existing housing laws, building more immediately affordable housing units, breaking up the love affair of single-family homes, and going in on mixed-use, mixed-income properties," he said.

How zoning can lead to high housing prices

Here's an example of a zoning law that preserves the low-density character of suburbs and blocks the development of affordable housing: Single-family zoning (often called R1) prevents the building of any kind of housing except detached, single-family homes. This keeps population density low in these areas by regulating how many people can live in a certain square footage.

In cities with more land set aside for single-family homes, R1 zoning creates a shortage of affordable housing, since multi-family dwellings - such as apartment buildings - can't be built. In Los Angeles, 70% of residential land is zoned as R1, and in Seattle, it's 80%, which advocates say sets the stage for a competitive and exclusionary housing market. Many families displaced from multi-family dwellings in urban areas cannot afford to move to single-family communities, so by breaking up these zoning laws, it creates opportunities to build more affordable housing.

Some cities are already starting to alter their residential zoning laws. Bend, Oregon made news last year when Gov. Kate Brown (D) signed a law requiring Oregon cities with more than 1,000 residents to allow duplexes in areas that were previously zoned exclusively for single-family homes. The same law requires that cities with more than 25,000 residents must allow townhomes, triplexes, and fourplexes.

Other cities, like Minneapolis, have followed suit. The Minneapolis law allows duplexes and triplexes to be built anywhere in the city. Previously, nearly three-quarters of the city was zoned for single-family housing.

Taxing vacant properties to free up housing stock

Housing advocates say that without government action, low-income residents across the country face displacement because of rapidly changing neighborhoods. Shirah Dedman's 2018 documentary "You a Nomad'' analyzes the gentrification of Oakland, California, where over a period of 10 years, Oakland lost 25% of its Black population. Dedman said that the loss was fueled in part by "generations of economic apartheid," a term used to describe a system designed to keep Black people from equal access to things like housing and jobs.

Because of Oakland's proximity to San Francisco, it became home to growing tech companies looking for tax breaks, and tech employees looking for a cheaper place to live. From 2011 to 2016, the median home price in Oakland increased 178%. The demand for property in Oakland drove up home values, but it also drove out many Black residents.

Dedman said the way to protect residents from gentrification is to first decrease the number of properties that sit empty. According to the Census Bureau, there are thousands of empty homes in the Bay Area - and nearly 6,000 vacant homes in Oakland alone.

"I think one of the most promising strategies for protecting long-standing residents from gentrification is Oakland's vacancy property tax," said Dedman.

The vacancy tax was approved by a ballot measure in November 2018 and went into effect the following year, establishing an annual tax on vacant properties of $3,000 to $6,000. So far, it's too soon to tell whether the tax has provided more affordable housing.

Dedman hopes the tax will eventually increase the number of homes and rentals in the market, and hopefully drive down housing prices. "In general, curbing Oakland's highly speculative housing market and increasing the number of living-wage jobs is what's needed for long-term housing sustainability," said Dedman.

Empowering residents to resist gentrification

In Atlanta, Kamau Franklin is fighting gentrification by working to organize and educate residents. He's the director of Community Movement Builders, and their mission is to create sustainable, self-determining communities through cooperative economics and community organizing.

For Franklin, the answers to gentrification lie in education and organization. Franklin told Business Insider that the only real way to achieve success is to organize people so they can collectively respond to real estate developers, finance capital, and elect officials who are more interested in keeping working-class people in their homes than in building new real estate.

"Several organizations we work with, including the national organization Right to the City, use organizing renters and/or working-class homeowners to challenge the power of these organized groups, who admittedly have the advantage because of their wealth," said Franklin. "So, the model is organizing renters' associations, neighborhood associates, and activist groups. That includes political education to confront the ideology that homes are just a commodity to be bought and sold without any thinking about what happens to the social fabric of a neighborhood."

Franklin's Community Movement Builders organization has been able to purchase two properties in the historically Black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and they are currently raising money to buy more properties through a "buy back the block" campaign to protect the community from developers.

Long term, though, Franklin sees the need for a complete paradigm shift in the way we approach housing. "In order to fight gentrification, there has to be a change in how we think about housing," he said. "As opposed to the 'market' being the arbiter of who deserves to have shelter or not, we should move to a human-rights-centered approach that says everyone deserves homes and that government policy should reflect this."

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Gentrification doesn't have to force minority residents out of their homes. Activists say there are 3 ways to protect communities.

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When a neighborhood gentrifies, new homes rise, new businesses move in, and property values go up. But longtime, low-income minority residents are also often priced out. Activists say that changing single-family zoning laws and taxing owners of vacant properties can help to create more affordable, accessible housing.