Migrant Workers’ Lives Are Uprooted by Storm

When Carmen Rivera gets to work every morning, she checks her office for messages and then starts walking. She’s a social worker who goes door-to-door at the Everglades farmworker camp, which houses about 400 families, visiting residents and identifying needs. She rarely has time to sit down in her sparsely furnished office. But when the…

To do that, the Homestead-based nonprofit housing organization which provides affordable housing for rural poor, migrants and seasonal farmworkers in Collier, Hillsborough and Miami-Dade counties offers a program that gives tenants in their affordable housing developments 5 percent of their rent back to help them become a homeowner…. “We wish to encourage tenants to not…

Marisol Avenir has spent the past four months living in a place she calls paradise. It’s a stone’s throw from the Dade County prison on a road that leads to farmland once devoured by Hurricane Andrew. “In Homestead,” she says, “I’ve lived in three different places. I’m super happy here.” Read the article East Coast…

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…

“They’re beautiful homes. There are places for kids to play,” said Carmen Roqueta, director of Tenant Services for Everglades Community Association, which manages farm worker housing properties throughout Florida. “No one can ever believe that’s housing for farm workers.” Read the article Better Place