Metro Approves Migrant Housing in Leisure City

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…

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…

The residents of Naranja Lakes and environs — living in a square mile of South Dade in not much better shape than the day after Hurricane Andrew — often feel like the storm’s forgotten victims. Their self-interests — some legitimate — now threaten careful plans to house temporarily other oft-ignored residents: migrant farmworker families. Read…

Four months ago, a 14-member board of deep South Dade growers, migrants, ministers and businessmen took over operation of the 400-trailer Everglades Migrant Labor Camp south of Florida City. The camp was hastily developed by Metro nine years ago to cope with a migrant housing crisis and a smallpox epidemic. Last summer, Metro commissioners voted…

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…

Big Cypress Housing Corp. Inc. plans to develop rental housing units for legal migrant and seasonal farmworkers in Immokalee, west of Carson Road. The nonprofit housing organization will construct 92 multifamily rental housing units on the 20-acre property, named the Reserves at Eden Gardens. Read the article New Family Housing