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Razing Liberty Square

Liberty City, Miami, was home to one of the oldest segregated public housing projects in the U.S. Now with rising sea levels, the neighborhood's higher ground has become something else: real estate gold. Wealthy property owners push inland to higher ground, creating a speculators' market in the historically Black neighborhood previously ignored by developers and policy-makers alike. Miami is ground-zero for sea-level-rise. When residents of the Liberty Square public-housing community learn about a $300 million revitalization project in 2015, they know that their neighborhood is located on the highest-and-driest ground in the city. Now they must prepare to fight a new form of racial injustice: Climate Gentrification.
 
 
Miami is beloved for its beaches and waterfront homes and businesses. See how engineers and planners are trying to protect Miami from rising seas and ever-more-frequent and violent storm surges that could destroy the city’s tourist and business economy. Includes the topic of climate gentrification.
 

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Subject Specialist

  • Terri Robar

    Communication, Media, Geography, and Maps Librarian

    trobar@miami.edu

Special Materials

Race, housing, and displacement oral history collection, 2020

Thanks to a grant sponsored by UM Libraries as part of the CREATE Grant Fall 2019 grant Cycle Awards, students under the supervision of Professor Robin Bachin (Associate Professor/Assistant Provost for Civic and Community Engagement) conducted interviews with Miami community members in neighborhoods that have undergone significant transformations over the last several decades.The Race, housing, and displacement oral history collection documents the complicated and significant interconnections among race, housing, and displacement in Miami during the twentieth century. The 6 interviewees are from various neighborhoods including Overtown, Liberty City, and Little Haiti. The interviews were conducted over Zoom during April 2020.

Erica Dawn Lyle papers, 1991-2010

The Erica Dawn Lyle papers offer a rich history of Miami's countercultural art and music scenes and grassroots political activity from the 1990's to the present. Writing under the name Iggy Scam, Lyle has produced a series of classic underground fanzines, called SCAM, that are known internationally in the punk rock scene. Lyle's writing and archive also provides a fascinating back story to some of the political activity Miami is now known for. With the current wave of home foreclosures that has spread across South Florida, has come a resurgent wave of housing activism. The most well-known activist group in Miami today is Take Back The Land, a group that has gained national media attention for their tactics in helping homeless families move into and squat homes that have been foreclosed across Miami. The Lyle papers show a pre-history of an equally militant though far less organized and coherent group of South Florida squatters and anti-gentrification activists who were attempting similar tactics a generation ago. The papers also document the formation of the city's first Food Not Bombs, a group that is still active today. The collection of zines, journals, sketchbooks, ephemera and original art work depict contemporary social history as well as Greater Miami's issues of urban planning, property and housing rights and the responsibility and role of art. Also well documented are Lyle's travels through unconventional methods such as hitchhiking and train hopping.