Magali Perez, 25, remembers coming home from her job at a plant nursery, hoping she was next in line to use the kitchen shared by four families living under one roof. They shared one stove, so they had to cook and eat in shifts. She and her husband, Ramiro, and their five children now have their own kitchen.
Read the article Cultivating A Home
This past week our legislators slashed $190M in affordable housing construction. Just as essential elected officials broke faith with working people, investors and other governments as it violated signed loan commitments previously agreed. Such rash, unthinking action results in the loss of $1B in construction expenditures, a thousand jobs and the risk of bankruptcy to…
Unaccompanied workers are usually faced with the “last-least shelter” in a rural community; isolated units or ones far below building code requirements that at the “least” desirable housing in a local community and the “last” to be rented. Read the article Rural Voices
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…
For a week, the migrant workers and field hands in the spartan Everglades Labor Camp four miles west of this farming center found themselves at the end of the relief lines, ignored and isolated as they battled hunger, thirst and then the weekend’s rains. Time and again, an ambulance or police car would stop, residents said…
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
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…