In Miami, a tangled tale of lost public housing
When Caprice Brown and her three children were evicted six years ago from their rundown apartment in one of the most depressed areas of Miami, they were promised a sparkling new housing development that would revitalize the community.
Instead, they ended up in a single room of her aunt's already crowded house nearby. With little money for food and stripped of housing benefit vouchers, she slept on the floor while her sons aged 13 and 10, and her 11-year-old daughter shared the room's only bed. Then in January, she and her children moved into a private rental apartment.
Six years after the evictions, the 42-acre site in Liberty City that used to be their home remains demolished, fenced off, and abandoned.
Ms. Brown is among thousands of victims of one of the nation's biggest housing scandals, which saw millions of dollars of public money lost, squandered, or stolen while the Miami-Dade Housing Agency failed to deliver on promises of affordable new accommodations for its poorest citizens.
Hundreds of families were made homeless or simply disappeared from the system. They were waiting for help from an agency riddled by mismanagement and corruption, which is now the subject of a federal investigation that could have implications for low-income housing policy nationwide.
Meanwhile, the waiting list for public housing in one of America's most expensive cities for real estate has grown to more than 41,000 names.
"I'm angry about the lies that were told to us," says Brown. Her family was one of more than 850 uprooted when the agency pulled down the crumbling Scott Carver public housing project to make way for a partly government-funded revitalization project that was never built.
The stalled Scott Carver Homes project, for which the local authority accepted $35 million of government money, is the worst of many missteps dating back to 1998 that brought the agency to the attention of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
An audit released last week confirmed massive misuse of public funds, tax irregularities, and countless incidents of sloppy or suspicious recordkeeping. The agency, for example, employs only about 690 workers, yet 1,811 appeared on payroll records, 115 of them with Social Security numbers belonging to deceased individuals.
Another criticism was that at least $12 million was paid to developers, through a nonprofit corporation set up by the agency, for housing projects that were never started or were delayed. One developer, Oscar Rivero, faces criminal charges of taking $740,000 meant for 54 low-income houses in Little Havana to buy himself a luxury home in south Miami.
A second, Raul Masvidal, was arrested last Friday on charges of grand theft and organized fraud. Among his alleged crimes? Skimming $150,000 from public money to buy himself a sculpture of a watermelon.
HUD secretary Alphonso Jackson's response was to send a "hit squad" of seven investigators to Miami, and he announced last week that he intends to take the rare step of ordering a federal takeover of the agency's finances and services. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez is resisting, claiming that the county had turned a corner by replacing the agency's leadership with a new director of housing and team of experienced advisers.
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