In last week’s Miami Today focus on Coral Gables’ Centennial, a 1924 photo sticks in mind: buses rolling through the Granada Entrance gate chock full of new residents flocking here for a better life. That picture symbolizes our lost past.
Developer George Merrick had 100 pink “Coral Gables” buses constantly on the road to bring in land buyers from across the nation seeking rays of our sunshine. They came through seven city welcoming gates.
Unlike today, however, those were everyday folks, not wealthy buyers of glitz. Coral Gables appealed at its outset to the nation’s very broad middle class.
Mr. Merrick was selling affordable housing and a comfortable Florida life. Today, sadly, our middle class is far less broad or comfortable.
If we had pink buses today, they’d be rolling through exit gates carrying Miami-Dade residents moving elsewhere to find those affordable homes and hauling many of our immigrants to airports to be expelled.
If we didn’t have huge influxes of newcomers from abroad and the New York metropolitan area, Miami-Dade County today would be losing about 45,000 net residents a year in population shifts that only include willing departures, not counting those that ICE is freezing out. That equals a monthly trip by 100 buses filled with residents moving elsewhere by choice.
That’s why the 1924 photo is so poignant: in those days they wanted desperately to get here. Today (other than those ICE seizures) they want to get away.
The “why” in this departure picture is overwhelmingly a higher living cost here. People don’t want to get out of Florida, they just want to be able to pay to live in this state. And in South Florida, where wages are below national average, costs of living are far out of balance with incomes.
The prime example is housing. We do indeed build housing, but the big towers are for people who can afford them, people who flow in from abroad and New York City. The Miamians they are displacing can’t afford that housing.
This imbalance is unhealthy, because new high-end residents aren’t doing work that supports a community via everyday jobs that we all rely on. The people doing those needed jobs can’t afford to live near where they work, and their cost in both money and time to commute to a job is a heavy burden.
That’s a major reason Miami-Dade is losing far more people to the rest of Florida than it’s regaining from those areas, a flow that census data corroborate. The same is true of much of the rest of the nation: factor out New York City and we are a net loser nationally too.
Miami-Dade has all the virtues and amenities of a global magnet community, but costs – especially in housing and commuting – repel residents.
Not all this loss is evident, because headlines tout high-end financial firms and tech hopefuls flowing in with their executives. But that’s a thin stream of newcomers and a dangerous form of gain on which to depend.
Now that covid is in the rearview mirror, for example, the flood from New York is slowing. Now that our national policies like tariffs and immigration enforcement have alienated the residents of so many other nations, flows here from abroad may well do the same – Florida has already suffered a huge loss of Canadian visitors who often become permanent residents.
Remember, subtract the influx from New York and other nations and Miami-Dade – which actually lost population during covid – could well see far more substantial and continuing population declines.
Some would say that thinning out the local population would be great: we’d have less traffic, less competition for housing, and no waits at restaurants. All true.
But we’d also have a plunging economy and fewer people from abroad to do the entry-level jobs that are very hard to otherwise fill. We’d have no waits at restaurants until they closed for lack of business or lack of employees. Extend that example to most forms of business and it’s not a pretty picture.
Government leaders cheer – rightly so – when we open a few hundred units of workforce housing. That helps. But those units may be fewer than the workforce units that disappear each year to be replaced by higher-end housing that most everyday workers can’t afford to live in.
Until we can get a combination of private enterprise and government housing initiatives to focus on the needs of workers rather than the desires of well-to-do newcomers, the more imbalanced our economy will become.
As long as government actions target keeping out workers we need from abroad and seeking to expel some who are already here while raising everyone’s cost of living via tariffs, the more difficult it will be to balance our economy.
Those big pink buses enriched developer George Merrick until the Florida boom collapsed, but they also brought thousands of new middle-class residents who enriched this community even more for a century.
Encourage our elected officials to gear up a modern form of busing for prosperity.
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