Troubled? Lost? Come to Paradise
Is the Magic Gone From the City Like Time Says? Nah. We’re Not So Much Dysfunctional as Easygoing

Miami residents take a perverse pleasure in our status. It’s so bad here, it’s good.

Illustration by Christian Meesey/Meesimo.com.

By Rebecca Wakefield

Will the last middle-class resident of Miami please take the shopping carts from the new Target at Midtown when you leave? According to Time magazine’s recent “There’s Trouble — Lots of It — in Paradise” article, the good and decent citizens of this unfair city are fleeing her traffic, insurance, housing and education woes in droves.

The piece was forwarded to nearly everyone in Miami via e-mail and got civic booster types in enough of a tizzy that downtown business weekly Miami Today put together an article all about how the magazine piece was wrong, and nobody would pay attention to it anyway.

The newspaper quoted Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce President Barry Johnson complaining about the “disappointing and disturbing article” that “did not take into account how a lot of issues are being resolved.” Apparently, the chamber is “actively engaged in work to focus on the transportation issue, on affordable housing.” This was news to me, but it turns out the work mostly involves things like hosting “summits to discuss solutions to the issues.” So sit back and take a chill pill, Miami. The chamber is on it.

Remember back in the Eighties, when Time called us “Paradise Lost” just because half the town was on fire and we were storing our surplus murder victims in rented refrigerator trucks? What’s with these people? Is Miami a promising but troubled teen in need of constant correction?

The world, or this country at least, has a seemingly bottomless appetite for nutty Miami stories. We are the comic relief, the release valve, for people in other cities who want to believe that they are OK, relatively speaking. They need us. We ought to charge for this stuff and put the money into a trust fund for affordable housing, public transportation, education and a living wage. Miami residents, meanwhile, take a perverse pleasure in our status. It’s so bad here, it’s good.

A brief sampling of recent local news: A mad cartoonist briefly takes over the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald with a realistic toy machine gun, declaring himself El Nuevo Herald’s new editor. A Catholic school discovers a priest’s gay wrestling videos online. Gunfire breaks out at a baby shower. Wildlife officials release a giant python into the Everglades to rat out other big snakes.

The University of Miami’s football season implodes after most of the team indulges in a brawl with a cross-town rival team during a game; a UM player is shot dead outside his home; and Coach Larry Coker is canned. A Cuban exile tries to get Miami police to investigate what happened to the $1.5 million he spent on boats, planes and explosives for an anti-Castro mission that never happened. Meanwhile another freedom-fighting exile is arrested in Los Angeles after an FBI raid turns up the largest stockpile of weapons and explosives it has ever found inside someone’s house.

And the most successful homeless housing program in the city right now is run by a bunch of protesters squatting on public land. (By the way, the shanty village in Liberty City is still there and hosting up to 35 homeless residents as of this week.)

The Time story in 1981, an extensive narrative on Miami’s post-Mariel woes penned by James Kelly, was all about the “epidemic of violent crime, a plague of illicit drugs and a tidal wave of refugees” transforming the place. Remarkably, even though we survived all that, the subtext then was the same as it is now, and perhaps will ever be — a lack of community. And the fear and distrust Miami “natives” have for its latest wave of newcomers.

“The Latins are gradually turning the region into their own colony,” Kelly wrote, and quoted the first (and until Rudy Crew, only) black school district superintendent lamenting that “after a generation of being Southern slaves, blacks now face a future as Latin slaves.” Yowza!

“We are still longing for maturity,” local historian Arva Moore Parks said 25 years ago in that article. “We have always been vulnerable to certain kinds of people, so that when opportunity knocked, exploitation answered.”

In 2006, Parks still thinks that’s true, although she’s a born and bred Miamian who could not contemplate living anywhere else. In 1980, as the Mariel tent city formed under I-95 and Liberty City burned, Parks was finishing the first version of her book Miami, the Magic City. “I didn’t know how to end it,” she recalls. “So I wrote a poem about the rain and the sun coming out. In 1990, I updated the book. My feeling was Dadgum, all this happened? The Eighties was the decade when Miami was totally transformed.”

Parks watched the lights in the dark towers along Brickell Avenue wink on slowly, from three or four, to hundreds. The overbuilding boom and bust we’re in right now? The flippers and speculators? Happened before. Will happen again.

Why? Parks throws a couple of old quotes at me, from the 1930s. “Nothing in Miami is foreign to it,” she says, quoting Marjory Stoneman Douglas, before lifting another quote from a magazine of the era. “Miami is the harlot of American cities, and like most harlots, is particularly attractive.”

What then, is the source of the allure, the magic? In a word: reinvention. “Miami does three things well,” Parks advises. “We overcome adversity. We absorb new people. And we adapt to change. People come to Miami to start their lives over again. If you have the ability to see change as exciting and not scary, you’re going to like Miami.”

Daniella Levine, executive director of the Human Services Coalition of Dade County, was quoted in the more recent Time article. She agrees that life in Miami is stressful, thus producing a constant stream of in- and out-migration. “People who can’t take the heat will leave,” she says. “But it’s not like there aren’t others right behind them wanting a taste.”

She admits it took her a good 10 of the 25 years she’s lived in Miami to see the frustrations of this place as opportunities for action. “I just feel that Miami is at the cusp,” she says. “We haven’t figured out how to make the best of it for our own people. We haven’t really understood our own potential. People don’t really self-identify as being from Miami, so there’s a shallow commitment to place. Is it just a place where they are staying – or a place where they are living? Our challenge is how to create a sense of the connectivity.”

That’s not to say the problems identified in the Time story are not real. We really do have an affordable housing crisis, chamber of commerce summit or no. Even Parks’ children are leaving. “My children are moving out of town for that reason,” she says. “That makes me very sad.”

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.