“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

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… Read more »

In Homestead, farmworkers have a choice of living in what one resident calls paradise. The community is called Everglades Village. The housing project was built by an organization called the Everglades Community Association, a public-private group whose goal is to build decent and affordable housing for farmworkers. Read the article Group to Build Housing for… Read more »

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… Read more »

In an unprecedented effort of cooperation, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman and U.S. Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman pledged their commitment to local farmworkers last week on a two-day visit to South Dade. Read the article Farmworkers Get Cabinet Support

Less than two years after the Everglades Community Association began a 500-unit project to house farm workers, 240 homes have been completed, 135 families have moved ir, and bids on the project’s second phases are expected to go out next month. Everglades Villages, south of Florida City on the way to Everglades National Park, is… Read more »

“Cip” Garza remembers the Everglades Labor Camp when hundreds of migrant families stayed in broken down trailers with leaky roofs, sagging floors and no electricity. Read the article Farm Laborers Getting New Housing Complex

The new housing complex, developed by the Everglades Community Association (ECA), a nonprofit agency that maintains both the Royal Colonial and the Andrew Center, is being paid for with $41.2 million in grants and loans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service; additionally, the We Will Rebuild Foundation, a private nonprofit group founded… Read more »

Juanita Mainster’s own life motivates her to rewrite the usual script for children of migrant and seasonal farmworkers. The 42-year-old can easily recall being rounded up by the Border Patrol in fields north of Brownsville, Texas, and deported to Mexico — even though she was a U.S. citizen. “My parents were undocumented, so I got… Read more »

A seed planted more than 20 years ago in South Dade is finally yielding a harvest. The last of 240 foundations for single-family homes has been poured at the Everglades Farmworkers Villages…. The first 69 homes will be ready for families at the end of January – the result of a process that was first… Read more »