In Progress: Miami Boom I

From deep within the affordable housing crisis in South Florida, a group of homeless people living in Miami's dangerous Liberty City neighborhood banded together to create an illegal shantytown on a vacant lot. The encampment, named Umoja and located on the northwest corner of NW 62nd St. and 17th Ave., celebrated 6-months of independent living from the city, along the way defeating several attempts to shut it down, last weekend with a block party and rally. What began as a protest to demonstrate the massive shortage of very-low and low income housing despite the incredible boom in development that Miami is experiencing, became a home to at least 4 dozen people, with a waiting list to boot, contrasting the thousands of new high-end condo units lining the Biscayne corridor.

However and sadly, early this morning a candle accidentally started a fire amongst the tarps, trash, plywood, and shopping carts, and completely burnt the village down, again reuniting Umoja's residents with the more than 5,000 other homeless living in Miami. No one was hurt in the blaze, which rose nearly 100-feet high according to police. Many residents cited the complete lack of water as one of the reasons that the fire destroyed the small shantytown.

A Umoja resident (top) sleeps between discarded telephone poles that have been gathered near the shantytown after an early-morning fire burned the illegal encampment to the ground. Community members gather (above) at the scene of the fire and watch city crews begin to remove the burnt out remains with construction equipment. (Click on images for a larger version)

After reading some of the NYT headlines early this morning online, I visited the Miami Herald homepage and saw a news alert about the fire... then quickly put on some shoes and headed over to Liberty City to see what had happened myself. In the early morning light the scorched earth was still steaming when I arrived and things were pretty tense between the media and the displaced residents of the shantytown. So I waited and listened to stories. I talked a bit with the small group of other media members there (a surprisingly small number... I was expecting a scene). And finally it was OK to start taking some pictures, even though I ultimately only made a few dozen (a nice relief since I've been lately burning up my shutter).

I first read about Umoja months ago and immediately recognized its potential importance within my Miami Boom project (very much still in progress). I am still struggling to document the darker face of the development explosion, but this morning, and my subsequent return trips I plan to make in order to watch as the residents rebuild their camp (they seemed completely unified about this), was a step in the right direction.

Knowing that upscale condos are helping to destroy the middle class of the city and push us further and further out into the Western suburbs (which of course shouldn't even exist because they are destroying the Everglades) still doesn't make it easy to figure out ways to photograph that slowly decline. Its much easier to photograph the giant new high rises and cranes filling the air, and that is what I've mostly focused on thus far with the project. My hopes are that I can get some of my clients interested in the "progress" part of the story, and fill in the "reality" part as I can.

What this morning teaches me is that you can't just wait around and be lazy because the opportunities to tell the human stories within a project like this can literally disappear overnight if you aren't careful. It also reminds me that I need to form a lot more connections in the community to learn about these issues as they are happening, not in the next day's newspaper.

My main interest in the Miami Boom project is in connection with my frustration at how the business magazines report on financial news. Economics is what makes the world go round, and I've always felt that the business magazines should be filled with so much more than glossy, lit pictures of white dudes in suits. Who are those fuckers?, and how is it possible that we've continued to publish the same image over and over again? Why don't we spend more time actually looking at what their companies are doing and making, and how that is affecting millions of real people all over the world. Fortune does present some very cool stuff from time to time, and sometimes reporting on certain types of companies make anything but a CEO-approach impossible. But a lot of time, the difference is really just in ad revenue and laziness. How much easier is it to live with a format that just requires a new big face of a smiling CEO on your cover each month?

Burnt remains litter the former site of the village (above), leaving only a hand-painted sign at the edge of the block reading "Take Back The Land" left to start over at Umoja.

« Go to previous entry | Home | Go to next entry »

Comments (1)

Greetings:

Can I get permission to use a couple of your Umoja Village pictures? Please let me know.

forward,

Max Rameau

© 2006-2008 John Loomis. All Rights Reserved.