Jesse Scheckner
Miami-Dade has some 1,000 unsheltered people living within its borders, and the County Commission is on the verge of approving a plan to help around 140 of the most vulnerable among them gain permanent, affordable housing.
It won’t be cheap. The proposal calls for spending almost $15 million to convert a 107-room La Quinta Inn & Suites in Cutler Bay into an apartment building offering rent-controlled lodging to unhoused individuals 55 and older.
Commissioners in May gave a preliminary OK to the plan that did not include a funding earmark. A final, “extraordinary vote” on the matter that includes $14 million to buy the property, $40,000 in closing costs and up to $950,000 for “property retrofitting” is set for Tuesday.
Eileen Higgins is sponsoring the authorizing measure, which would authorize a spending breakdown of $7 million in county HOMES Plan funds set aside for housing affordability programs. Another $8 million could potentially come in the form of Food and Beverage Tax reserve funds, a memo from Miami-Dade Chief Administrative Officer Carladenise Edwards said.
But Edwards added that the county expects the city of Miami to provide the $8 million sum from funds it received through the American Rescue Plan Act.
The estimated annual cost of operating the property is $1.64 million, also to be funded with Food and Beverage Tax money.
The pending vote on the purchase plan follows two others this month, one on Sept. 4 and another the night after, during the Commission’s first hearing on the county’s 2024-25 budget.
Danielle Cohen Higgins, who represents the South Dade district in which the La Quinta stands at 10821 Caribbean Blvd., voted to stop the project on both occasions. She argued there are cheaper alternative sites and that the agency backing the proposal, the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust, “hasn’t been audited in decades.”
Victoria Mallette O’Brien, the Homeless Trust’s Director, said the state of Florida and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development both regularly audit the agency. A memo Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava submitted to the Commission in April said that a “thorough examination” of other options in the district found “no alternative” was better.
Commissioners Kevin Cabrera and Anthony Rodriguez joined Cohen Higgins in voting against the plan on Sept. 4. But Cabrera, who criticized the plan as insufficiently transparent when he also voted with Cohen Higgins against it in May, switched sides during the budget hearing this month to vote for the project.
Lobbyist Ron Book, who chairs Homeless Trust, told Florida Politics the proposal should — and will — pass. He said opposition amounts to “classic NIMBYism,” meaning those against the plan are OK with it, just “not in my backyard.”
“The comments made in various public hearings have been nothing short of nauseating,” he said, adding that the Homeless Trust, which he has chaired for a quarter-century, has a proven model for addressing homelessness that other metropolitan areas have long tried to emulate, but seldom do so as successfully.
“We’ve been doing it for three and a half decades, and it’s why we’re down to 1,000 unhoused while Los Angeles still has 75,000,” he said.
“When we started two and a half decades ago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami-Dade had one thing in common, other than that we were all urban; all of us had between 8,000 and 11,000 unhoused. Miami-Dade is at 1,000 now, and what we’re doing here is an effective continuum. Trying to derail things that bring about the end of homelessness — especially with 1365 staring us in the face two weeks from now — is detrimental to what we believe our community needs and expects us to do.”
Book referred to HB 1365, a new law Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in March that beginning Oct. 1 will ban local governments from allowing people to sleep or camp on public property without explicit permission.
The measure, which the GOP-controlled Legislature passed along party lines, also compels counties and municipalities to round up and relocate unhoused people to places that offer clean restrooms, running water, on-site security and bans on drugs and alcohol. No government site could continue operation as a so-called homeless camp for longer than a year.
