Miami's House of Lies

Miami’s “House of Lies”

In late July of this year, the Miami Herald newspaper published a five-part series that exposed a huge and horrible public housing scandal. Debbie Cenziper is the prolific writer who spent seven months investigating every major building program at the Housing agency in Miami. She is to be commended for her thorough, accurate and fair presentation of the sordid details that surround this story. As a result of the series of articles, much needed action has been taken to clean up the city’s public housing problem.

If you get a chance, you may want to go out to the Miami Herald online (www.miami.com) and pull up the articles. Or you can just “google” the key words “Miami public housing scandal” which will give you direct links to the articles.

I have attempted below to provide some of the major facts surrounding the story.

- In one instance, the Housing Agency paid more than $12 million to developers who promised dozens of houses but built only two, and years later, never returned the money

- In some cases, the Housing Agency allowed developers to take the cash without signing loan documents or pledging land as collateral

- The Housing Agency diverted another $5 – money earmarked to build homes for the poor – to pay for a new office building

- The Housing Agency repeatedly allowed developers to miss construction deadlines on buildings. On 12 projects alone, delays stretched a total of 13 years

- More than $22 million has been spent to replace dilapidated housing in Liberty City with 411 new homes. Only three houses have been built in six years.

- Oscar Rivero is chairman of the Miami Parking Authority and is also one of the developers who promised to build houses for low-income families. Miami-Dade Housing Agency and the Miami Department of Community Development paid Rivero $1.6 million to build 78 houses for low-income families; none of which were ever built.

- In the past five years, the Miami-Dade Housing Agency squandered millions of dollars on failed projects, pet programs and insider deals while thousands of families languished in rotting and unsafe homes.

- A cadre of developers raked in millions of dollars for homes that have never been built

- Overall the Housing Agency pledged more than $87 million to put up 72 developments for the poor, which would result in 8,300 new homes

- 40% of the projects funded between 2003 and 2005 have been canceled and others are being delayed for months and years. Only 14 projects (1/5 of what was pledged) have been completed

- Of the projects that were completed, in many instances the developers bypassed the poor and sold to real estate investors for tremendous profits

There’s a lot more to this story but time and space don’t allow me to cover it all in this blog.

This story made me sick when I read it the first time back in early August, and it sickens me now as I review it again.

Miami is the nation’s least affordable city when it comes to housing, so you can imagine the thousands of low-income families who scrape by in substandard and unsafe housing. Housing authorities are supposed to help families have safe, clean, stable places to live. The Miami Herald states that their city’s housing authority is “flush with land and money.” Instead, the Housing Agency (Miami’s housing authority equivalent) leaders made money for themselves.

This is an example of what happens when policies and procedures are pushed to the side so that insiders in leadership positions can get rich quick. As the author of Chapter Six indicated, the housing industry processes can be so confusing, the low-income residents it seeks to serve are typically not able to be fully engaged in the process because they don’t understand the financing, the partners, the permitting process, etc. As a result, residents are displaced and allowed to languish in horrible housing conditions while they blindly sit and wait for new housing to be built.