YES! to The Miami Workers Center and LIFFT, by gimleteye

A new power center is emerging in the African American communities of Liberty City and Overtown: it is called The Miami Workers Center and Low Income Families Fighting Together (LIFFT).

These grass-roots organizations are doing best what grass-roots groups can do: organize on behalf of the powerless for positive change, person by person, door to door.

“There is an epidemic of greed at work here,” Tony Romano told a crowd of appreciative residents, frustrated by the age-old problem of slumlords in their neighborhoods and government inaction. The story appears on the front page of The Miami Herald Metro Section, “Slum-Sluggers” and a local news segment on WLRN.

Romano’s comments were directed specifically to the issue of affordable housing for the poor.

But the same greed runs straight through the political elite of in Miami Dade county. That’s not what it’s called at County Hall: a strange culture where little diverse opinion seeps in and where profit is held up to the be the highest virtue even among the God-fearing. No wonder the poor suffer most.

Occasionally the pestilence rises to the surface, as it does today on The Miami Herald front page: “Lobbyist gets house arrest in plea deal.”

The Sandy Walker plea deal is notable. Walker is the cornerstone of a family trio of African American powerbrokers, including the county commissioner Barbara Jordan and Florida City mayor Otis Wallace.

Together they worked hard in 2004-2006 to pass zoning changes that would have doubled the size of Florida City by wedging a new Lennar development into Biscayne Bay wetlands outside the Urban Development Boundary. They led a coordinated effort to by-pass local, state and federal environmental laws—playing one regulatory jurisdiction off another in a monumental, money, energy consuming waste of time.

The project was born in the exuberance of the building boom and was so outrageous, so clearly inappropriate to the location, it was bound to fail if only because of environmental and water supply concerns. Until the collapse of the housing market, all systems were “go”. (Today, Lennar is persisting in pushing for a massive development outside the Urban Development Boundary in far West Dade that requires approvals and funding a CSX rail line for public transit: a holy war now led by former county chairman Joe A. Martinez, whose relation to the development lobby is well documented by The Miami Herald.)

In the case of Florida City Commons, the prospective profit was so enormous, all hands were called on deck to make this pie in the sky dream possible, and in particular, the surrounding neighborhoods that are primarily poor African American.

In a Florida City annexation public hearing, The Miami Workers Center made a prescient point: that county commissioners were trying “to pit brown against green”; that is to say, poor people against environmentalists.

Of course, it appeared not to phase the county commission at all that the proposed Florida City Commons would have little to no benefit to the poor and the needs of affordable housing they claimed to represent.

In relation to Florida City Commons, Sandy Walker, Barbara Jordan, and Otis Wallace demonstrated how and why African American leadership concentrates on problems that have more to do with their own power than the needs of poor African Americans. Of course, arguments to the contrary are all wrapped up in the fiction that expanded tax base serves all needs.

The lure of millions of dollars on engineering and lobbying and lawyering fees was irresistible, as it had been a decade earlier with the planned conversion of the nearby Homestead Air Force Base to a private commercial airport, to benefit powerful members of the Latin Builders Association board of directors, reconstituted as HABDI. In that case, too, African American leaders and lobbyists from the urban core were called forth, for their cut of the action. (Notably, Congresswoman Carrie Meek sat on the sidelines, allowing US Senator Bob Graham to do the heavy work trying to push the air base conversion past federal laws.)

Both projects were promoted as a multi-billion dollar benefits to those of economic need and used the poor and disenfranchised as pawns in the zoning and permitting game. Both were supported by African American county commissioners. (Arthur Teele was the notable exception in the case of the HABDI deal, involving a massive political gamble on his part.)

Consider what the focus on Florida City Commons did not do for affordable housing: Barbara Jordan spent more than a year huddled with Lennar and the South Florida Builders Association, in private, designing a formula for a mandatory affordable housing ordinance—a carrot to push through county approval of the project at a time when her constituents in her own district were being neglected, drowned by fraud and corruption at the Miami Dade Housing Agency.

When the details of the Jordan affordable housing ordinance finally emerged, they described “affordable housing” that would mainly benefit developers of production home builders in tract housing developments, not in the urban core. (Today, after the Florida City Commons and Urban Development Boundary applications crumbled, the “affordable housing ordinance” emerged from the influence of the South Florida Builders Association and Latin Builders Association as ‘voluntary’, not mandatory: a sad, pathetic detour from what housing experts around the nation know to be a fact: that mandatory affordable housing is the only way to assure that developers will commit to this important public purpose.)

Eyeonmiami has written frequently and scathingly about the weak and ineffective leadership in the African American community, notwithstanding legends and icons and charismatic leaders.

It has revealed itself in serial scandals afflicting the poor most: Umoja Village, Scott Carver redevelopment, Poinciana Biotech Park, the Miami-Dade Empowerment Trust, the Miami-Dade Transit and the Miami-Dade Housing Agency. And that’s just in the past year. You don’t have to go back much further to see the same at work: in lobbying scandals at Miami International Airport and Opalocka Airport, for instance, involving African American leaders.

The emergence of The Miami Workers Center and LIFFT is at the right time and in the right place.

Now that Sandy Walker has pleaded guilty to fraud with respect to insider dealings with the Empowerment Trust by submitting false tax returns, her plea agreement says that “she also must assist public-corruption prosecutors by ‘detailing her knowledge of and participation in the business of governmental relations in South Florida.’” We'll see about that.

More compelling may be her faith, if it is true. As publisher of The Gospel Truth, a community newspaper, Ms. Walker might want to consider being guided by Christian values.

But heart of the problem infecting African American leadership is not individual sin: it is the uneven, unequal, and disturbing balance between the African American community and the Cuban American power elite in Miami and Miami-Dade. (Reflected in television cameras on election night in 2006, with Dorin Rolle, an African American county commissioner who pulls down a salary of more than $175,000 per year from a non-profit that received county funds, surrounded by fellow county commissioners Natacha Seijas, Joe Martinez, and Pepe Diaz.)

The African American community has always been on uneasy terms with the dominant political class, Cuban American businessmen who quickly transformed themselves from Cuban exiles to Miami’s leaders by manipulating municipal and county contracts and manipulating zoning authority and building permits.

The weight of segregation in Florida was not lifted by the rapid rise of this elite. For decades African American communities in Miami have languished.

Still, the Cuban American elite was pragmatic: they knew power had to be shared and that the best way to do this was to support an African American elite in exchange for their support for zoning decisions in outlying areas ripe for suburban sprawl.

The prize has always been real estate development in the suburbs, to serve a rapidly growing Hispanic middle class. It remains the focal point of wealth creation, even today, in the midst of the worst housing market collapse in a century.

Even now, African Americans on the county commission can be counted on for affirmative votes to support suburban sprawl in other commissioners’ districts. (Let's see what happens with the Lowe's application to move the Urban Development Boundary, in November.)

What do African American county commissioners care, so long as developers who benefit support their incumbency get what they want out west?

This power sharing relationship gives African American public officials a piece of the pie. It allowed Barbara Carey Shuler, a protégé of Carrie Meek, to maintain leverage and influence in the county, even to be appointed county chair, and in the award of contracts at MIA.

In the last twenty years, the single elected official who tried to resist this disastrous formula for power sharing was Arthur Teele—who paid a very heavy price for trying to cut his own path.

There is nothing secret about the formula: it is the gospel truth.

Let's hope Miami Workers Center and LIFFT can find a new generation of African American leaders. Imagine that.