Someone Oughta Pay
It’s Been Six Months Since the ‘House of Lies’ Exposé. So, All the Problems With Affordable Housing Are Solved, Right?

There are few rackets more profitable than housing, especially when the housing never gets built

Former residents of Scott-Carver Homes rally at the affordable housing complex’s last remaining building. Johnny Louis/JLN photos

By Rebecca Wakefield

We are now just a couple of weeks shy of six months since the Miami Herald ran its “House of Lies” investigative series on our county’s affordable housing travesty. The series exposed in excruciating detail how a handful of people got rich by stealing or squandering money meant to help poor people gain a foothold in the struggle toward the middle class.

The articles caused a number of sphincters to spasm at County Hall, as housing activists stormed commission chambers, loudly demanding answers. For a minute there, it looked like this scandal, among the many we’ve seen in recent years, would produce actual positive results.

In December, County Manager George Burgess issued an 18-page memo updating the mayor and commission on progress made. In short, the county hired a new executive director and chief financial officer, created a housing subsidy program, cancelled some contracts and waded through a neck-deep pile of documents the previous administration had left in disarray. Nothing flashy or definitive, but baby steps in the right direction. This is going to be a long process, one in which real benefit (people in homes, rather than another three feet of reports) won’t be measurable for a while.

But man, I want blood. I want specific people, like out-and-out crook Rene Rodriguez (former director of the Miami-Dade Housing Agency), to do prison time for this. The problem went far beyond one greedy little man. A lot of people, some very powerful, some past and current elected officials, made bank on the backs of the poor.

There are few rackets more profitable than housing, especially when the housing never gets built. The county departments responsible for dealing with poor people, especially black ones, have often had little or no scrutiny and thus become packed with cronies and incompetents whose jobs are not to serve the public. Nobody notices because poor people don’t have friends in high places.

You would think that the four black commissioners – Dorrin Rolle, Barbara Jordan, Audrey Edmonson and Dennis Moss – would be outraged, and riding Burgess like a rented mule to root out the rot at MDHA. Rolle, whose home base is in Liberty City, should be shouting from the pulpits about this, and bringing it up at every meeting.

Instead, he’s more concerned about keeping government (county, school board, etc.) funding of the agency that employs him, JESCA, an effective vote-brokering operation that also, incidentally, has some social service components. Why are the rest of them so quiet? Good question. The answer is the same as why few of the 13 commissioners are ever outraged about anything once the TV cameras disappear – they all profit from the close relationships they’ve forged within county government and in private industries that feed upon it.

 One thing the county has done is form something with the very impressive name of the Community Affordable Housing Strategies Alliance Task Force (CAHSA), slightly before the Herald series came out, but long after county officials knew it would. There’s a meeting today in fact (3 p.m. at 1401 NW Seventh St.).

The purpose of the group is to help guide the county in developing a comprehensive affordable housing strategy. It’s too soon to say whether any of the myriad suggestions the group has come up with will ever be implemented in any coordinated way.

 A friend of mine familiar with the inner workings of county government once told me that what we need is a sort of Non-Group for affordable housing. The Non-Group, for those unfamiliar, was a relic of a time when Miami was run by a small group of white men and a few token women and minorities. It was composed of mostly the titans of business in these parts, back when we had titans of business.

 These guys would sit around at informal, secret gatherings and talk about the big issues of the day, be they crime, homelessness, or transportation. They’d decide what needed to be done, then use their resources and influence to quietly push through critical changes.

I’d say their legacy was mixed, but the idea is not a bad one. The private sector can move faster. Also, government, even when it works well, cannot solve every problem this community has.

There is a weak descendent of the Non-Group surviving today, called the Miami Business Forum. It’s a group of roughly three dozen bankers, lawyers and CEOs considered among this town’s elite. They’ve made the occasional stab at issues (the airport authority, which exposed their weak bellies), but on the whole become nothing more than a gentleman’s club.

So it is left, once again, to the efforts of activist groups, such as the Miami Workers Center and many others, to keep pushing the issue into the public consciousness. The Workers Center and its allies have staged numerous protests and rallies, most recently to condemn the county for losing track of some 600 families of the 1,000 who were promised housing when they were kicked out of the Scott-Carver projects in Liberty City for the HOPE VI project that has yet to materialize. They were lied to and dispersed, which critics see as a conscious plan for gentrification.

Gihan Perera, the Workers Center’s executive director, looks at what has happened since “House of Lies” and doesn’t see much to cheer about. “To some extent, it’s more of the same,” he said. “In terms of the commitment to getting back on track, there are small steps, money allocated. But what has hit the streets is zero. It hasn’t turned into anything that’s real.”

Then there is Max Rameau, who dreamt up the most unlikely of affordable housing schemes, the shantytown village of homeless people parked upon vacant county and city lots in Liberty City. Rameau has outmaneuvered the well-paid public relations strategists of both governments to produce a media sensation and a real village that houses around 40 individuals.

The city of Miami attempted to pass an ordinance that would precede a raid and removal of the village, but negative media attention caused that district’s commissioner, Michelle Spence-Jones, to back down and remove the item from the commission agenda.

On Tuesday Victor Curry, head of the New Birth Baptist Church and newly elected leader of the Miami-Dade NAACP, invited Rameau and city and county officials to his weekly radio program on WMBM 1490-AM.

Curry asked what the end game for the shanty village was. What needs to happen for Shantytown to go away? Rameau explained that he’d been working on affordable housing issues for 10 years, attempting to get the county to fill vacancies it had created, shorten the 40,000-plus waiting list etc. … but could never get anywhere. “We’ve been putting demands out there,” he said. “We’ve done that a hundred times and got nothing in return.”

So Rameau decided to simply ignore government and empower people to take their land and build on it themselves. “This is not a protest, although it has protest elements,” he explained. “It’s fundamentally providing people with a place to live.”

Then Curry asked guest Michelle Spence-Jones to elaborate on her role in this crisis. First, she put the blame on those who predated her term in office. Then, as politicians typically do, she claimed to be working on the problem in a number of ways, and pointed to the revamped Model City Trust as an example.

One subject during the three-hour program was Mayor Manny Diaz’s plan to use Overtown CRA money to help build a Marlins baseball stadium. Spence-Jones, a former employee of Diaz’s, and who owes a significant part of her electoral success to his vast fundraising machine, is chairwoman of the CRA. She professed surprise at the idea. “I almost fell out of my bed when I saw [the story] this morning,” she said. “I do not support dollars from the CRA for that. I have no idea where that came from.” Later she called the plan “crazy.”

Curry, for his part, lamented that the affordable housing pinch we are all feeling is driving a “mass exodus” of middle-class blacks out of Miami-Dade to less expensive places like Atlanta. “There you can buy a three-bedroom house for $150,000,” he said. “Here, you can’t put a dent in anything. I don’t know if it’s by design. We need to deal with the political aspect of this as well as the moral aspect of this.”

Rameau opined that the only thing that would make a real difference would be a “wholesale public policy change of low-income housing.” Shantytown exists because the political will to do that does not. “Short of that, we’re just playing games here,” he added.

Curry, who noted that Mayor Diaz and Manager Burgess had both declined invites to the show because of scheduling conflicts, said he wants them and the county commission chairman to weigh in.

“They have stolen the money,” he said. “There’s a recovery program going on ... [but] if we allow Shantytown to be the permanent solution, we’re in trouble. I’m begging like Keith Sweat that the county would do the right thing. I’m going to hold everybody to everything.”

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com