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
One of South Dade’s Farmworker communities is on the move. After months of delays, the Everglades Community Association has begun relocating trailers to a temporary site in Leisure City. Once the move is complete, construction of permanent housing will begin at the ECA site outside Florida City. “The funds have been allocated and thinks are…
Rural Neighborhoods’ President, Steven Kirk, testified before Congress in March 2021 before the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations at its Creating Equitable Communities through Transportation and Housing hearing. In answering the question as to how communities best apply a racial equity lens toward equitable development, he answered “no one…
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…
Proponents of a plan to provide permanent housing for South Dade farmworkers are not backing down from a key part that has come under fire in the last week. The housing plan developed by the Everglades Community Association includes the purchase of a trailer park in Leisure City that would provide temporary housing for about 1,500 farmworkers. Read…
The 120-acre mixed-use rental community is best described as A.A. – After Andrew. It is the reincarnation of a squalid mobile home park for migrant workers that was trashed by the 1992 hurricane. Of the 400 trailers – two sort of survived – while the demise of the others rendered 154 families instantly homeless. Rather…
When an unlikely group of farmers, migrant workers and businessmen came together 18 months ago to run Everglades Labor Camp, they never dreamed they would meet with the success they have. Dade County turned management of the 420-trailer camp over to the nonprofit Everglades Community Association in December 1982. Read the article Labor Camp Sees…