Former Gourmet editor and James Beard award-winner Barry Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from Immokalee, FL and presents a who’s who cast of characters in the tomato industry. This New York Times best-seller includes The Builder, a chapter highlighting Rural Neighborhood’s role in improving agricultural housing.
The challenges of site acquisition, land use, and competitive financing are no different in communities targeting agricultural workers than in other affordable rental communities, said Kirk. “The added complexity in serving farmworkers is to understand agricultural markets and wages, and to layer sufficient subsidies to reach affordability.” Read the article Seeds of Change
Rural Neighborhoods has built the best apartments available, period, in places like Immokalee, Labelle and Okeechobee, he said. “We’ve changed the perception of farm worker housing. I would be happy to live in any of our developments.” Read the article Gastronomica
Ten years ago, hundreds of migrants who harvested Homestead’s winter vegetables lived in dilapidated trailers at the Everglades Labor Camp near Naranja. The camp was set up in 1974 with 400 mobile homes provided by the U.S. Labor Department.[Steven Kirk]’s nonprofit association has spent the past 10 years using more than $40-million in local, state…
“Everglades Village is a much larger planned community than you would find in a typical tax-credit project or USDA-funded project,” says Steve Kirk, ECA’s executive Director, “Our Planning process was to build more of a self-contained community. Read the article Planning Magazine: Migrant Not Homeless
National public accounting firm Cohn Reznick Group profiles Rural Neighborhoods in a short video. Tom Neibaur, Director of Operations says, “We can put up the bricks and mortar, that’s the easy part. We could never have mastered the finance and accounting intricacies of our project without Cohn Reznick Group’s help.” Please click on the full…
Haven site May 5th, for construction of a 3,944-square-foot project consisting of 80 apartment units. The project is different than other projects, because it will also accommodate local low-income families. “We have different types of communities, and this is a family community where only 40 percent are for agricultural workers,” Kirk said. “The other (units)…