The Dream Defenders are taking their message to the floor of the United Nations.
The group, which is against Florida’s “stand your ground” law and formed in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, submitted an eight-page shadow report Friday to the U.N. Human Rights Committee answering questions the committee raised as to whether stand your ground violates the United States’ civil rights obligations. ...
Audra Wright’s large garden outside her Liberty City home yielded a bounty of fruits and vegetable for years – so much so that she figured she was able to cut her grocery bill in half for her and her three teenage sons.
But this summer, a broken sewage pipe from a neighboring apartment complex leaked waste into her garden, destroying the crop that she was counting on.
Sergio Palacios doesn't have the typical South Florida foreclosure story.
He doesn't live in a McMansion in some suburban subdivision. He wasn't tricked into a mortgage he couldn't afford. In fact, he doesn't own a home at all. He's a tenant. But for the last five months and counting, Palacios, an unemployed construction worker, has lived in his Liberty City apartment without running water.
Deutsche Bank filed a foreclosure suit against the property's owners in April. As Palacios and his roommate suffered through illness and joblessness, they have slipped out to friends' houses to drink and bathe when they could, and did without when they couldn't. ...
(Florida International University) – Nearly 100 parents, students and school administrators at a meeting Monday pressed the Miami-Dade School Board to adopt a “Restorative Justice” program to reduce suspensions, dropouts and arrests at public schools.
Supporters of the program say it views crime more broadly than simple law breaking, focusing on the harm it causes to victims, communities and the accused themselves, in addition to the judicial system.
The call came at a meeting at the Belafonte TACOLCY Center in Liberty City, sponsored by the Power U Center for Social Change, an activist organization that has been working on the issue for several years. ...
Miami Beach's lowest paid employees will see a pay raise nearly a decade in the making after elected officials voted to obey the city's own laws and increase its living wage.
Commissioners unanimously agreed Wednesday to hike the minimum hourly wage payable to employees of the city and its major contractors by about $1.50 come Oct. 1.
Public housing in this country is rapidly becoming endangered, and with it, the lives of low-income people. Public housing provides a safety net for the working poor and those on a fixed income, which is critical in today's housing market considering that as of 2008, there was no county in the U.S. where an individual working 40 hours a week at minimum wage could afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.
The state of public housing is the result of decades of bad policies, which has greatly impacted low-income communities, predominantly of color, throughout the country. This reality is uniquely portrayed in a recent report, We Call These Projects Home: Solving the Housing Crisis from the Ground Up, by the Right to the City Alliance (RTTC). ...
All she had was 48 hours to clear out her belongings and vacate the house where she had lived for three years.
One day last September, Gladys Flores received an unexpected visit from the owner of the property she rented in Little Havana. She had not seen him for months. Flores had religiously deposited the $600 monthly rent. The landlord came to inform her that the house had been repossessed by the bank. ...
It took three months for a group of 20 workers, men and women of all ages and nationalities, to finish scrubbing down and clearing away the dust at a newly renovated Miami Beach hotel.
The industrial cleaning crew worked for little more than minimum wage, hurrying to prepare the hotel in time for its reopening. But when payday arrived, they received only half of what they were owed by a subcontractor, according to Honduran worker Angelica Pinto.
The hotel bellman worked without breaks for a 16-hour shift when he was asked, but didn't get the contracted gratuity in his paycheck. A landscape subcontractor promised Guatemalan workers $100 a day for a week's work but disappeared on pay day. People in low-paying jobs -- U.S.-born and migrants alike -- are overly susceptible to unscrupulous employers who exploit them, as the South Florida Wage Theft Task Force has found.
Miami Beach — When Miami Beach became the first Florida city to pass a living-wage law in 2001, the legislation was hailed as a progressive move toward guaranteeing all full-time workers pay that would put them at or over the federal poverty line.
But these days, discussion of the city's law evokes words like ``sad'' and ``shocked.''
That's because for nearly nine years, Miami Beach has ignored the part of its law that requires the living wage be updated every year, leaving the lowest-paid employees of the city and city contractors at an hourly rate dollars below what it should be under the city ordinance.
South Florida Jobs with Justice and Mobile Home Council presented Chuck Elsesser and Jose Rodriguez with plaques in recognition of their immense work and support of the South Florida Mobile Home Council. They were presented with the awards in December of 2009, for their work throughout the year.
They awoke before dawn Tuesday to construct a ''tent city'' on a corner of the lawn at County Hall. They stayed outdoors in the late afternoon heat and into the rainy evening.
''Sleeping out here isn't much worse than the conditions a lot of people are used to here without any affordable housing,'' said Tony Romano, spokesman for the Miami Workers Center, a group advocating for families displaced by Miami-Dade County's affordable housing crisis.
Many such families stayed at the building anticipating today's county budget hearing. Most feel the $15 million earmarked by the county to repair public housing units isn't enough to do the job.
The money signified millions of dollars wasted by the Miami-Dade Housing Agency, demonstrators said. Those waving the bills defied a commission rule that calls for the removal of anyone holding a sign or heckling from the audience.
''My kids and I are living in one room and out of boxes. This is a disgrace,'' said Liberty City's Caprice Brown, her voice breaking as she looked directly at her district commissioner, Dorrin Rolle.
In a blistering report aimed squarely at the beleaguered Miami-Dade Housing Agency, the county's inspector general said Thursday that most of $4.1 million in payments meant to help people qualify to buy affordable homes was squandered on mismanagement.
A costly redevelopment program known as HOPE VI promised new, affordable housing for hundreds of families displaced from Liberty City's Scott/Carver Homes. The program has been dogged by irregularities, and county officials have been blasted for funding a housing agency that has misspent millions of dollars.
Former Home: Andrea Williams stands with her children on the site of their former apartment at Scott Homes public housing, which was torn down. (Raul Rubiera/Miami Herald Staff)
To read the entire 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning Miami Herald Expose, House of Lie$, click here.
