Issue 10 — Houses of Refuge
Disposable City, by Mario Alejandro Ariza
Dear Reader,
How does this letter find you? A couple of weeks ago, we were hoping my dear aunt would be out of the hospital in time to see her dogwood bloom. She’s now home, and we are joyful this week.
I would like to thank Nicole Gonzalez for pointing me to this week’s book. Follow Nicole on Twitter to be apprised of her adventures in cat-walking and fiction-writing. She has a story forthcoming in the Kenyon Review.
Review
Disposable City
Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe
Mario Alejandro Ariza
Bold Type Books, 2020
305 pages
$28.00
In 2018, I traveled across the United States with my colleague Heather Atwood to create a podcast about the 2018 midterm elections. We documented a new generation of leaders who were stepping up to run for elective office for the first time. And we also brought attention to the wave of citizens moved to activism by the shocking cruelty and anti-democratic actions of Donald Trump, and his Republican supporters in Congress. Early in that year we flew to West Palm Beach in order to acquaint ourselves with Florida’s 18th congressional district, which stretches north from Palm Beach Gardens and on up the “Treasure Coast” to quieter towns like Stuart. There we held a potluck lunch for local voters, in a historic rescue station on Gilbert’s Bar. It is the last surviving nineteenth-century house of refuge on the Florida coast. Men lived there to look out for shipwrecks when the big storms came and to rescue the survivors.
Although we had thought that health care and immigration would be the leading concerns of Florida voters, we discovered that environmental degradation was actually a key issue for many. Stormwater releases of contaminated agricultural wastewater from Lake Okeechobee into the St. Lucie River were (and are) creating foul and toxic algal blooms. Plans to fix the problem had been stymied by the politically powerful agriculture lobby, which holds significant sway over the Republican-controlled Florida legislature. The guy we met in the surf shop, the retiree who loves to fish, and the young urban farmers were all grieving for their river, and the dead, poisonous fish that were floating down it. This was my first taste of Florida’s environmental politics, and one thing was entirely clear: real estate economics reigns supreme. The best hope for these citizens was the fact that they had coastal real estate developers on their side, as a force to help counter the sugar, ranching, and citrus lobbies. Brian Mast, the incumbent Republican congressman, spoke out forcefully on behalf of his coastal constituencies. And in the end, he was re-elected.
I’ve been thinking back to that visit during the past week, as I read Mario Alejandro Ariza’s engrossing book Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe. Ariza is a Dominican-American journalist with a muckraker’s zeal and a taste for adventure. While The Great Derangement (see Issue 8) has helped me to appreciate the global forces at work in perpetuating the carbon economy, Disposable City provides a deeply-researched, hyper-local overview of the key issues facing a single landscape—one already heavily degraded— and also its people, who are experiencing some of the most glaring racial and economic inequalities in America.
From its first paragraph, Disposable City pulses with a sense of personal urgency, as Ariza reports on a conversation between Miami Mayor Frances Suarez and Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary General of the United Nations and now head of the Global Commission on Adaptation. “It was February 2019, and I sat behind them, listening as they spoke about the future of my city.” My city. In this opening section, Ariza pairs a survey of the latest range of predictions for sea level rise (3 to 6 feet by 2100) with his grandmother’s 80th birthday party (“our families are expansive, warm-hearted, prone to fits of dancing that last late into the night”). Gazing out the windows of the function room at the waters of Biscayne Bay, he wonders whether he will be able to celebrate his own 80th in the city he calls home. The average elevation above sea level for all of Miami-Dade and Broward Counties is 6 feet.
I’ll be eighty in 2067, and at that point I’ll hopefully be retired. My nieces and nephews will be in the workforce and looking to buy homes. That difference between the [South Florida Water Management District’s] predictions and the high end of the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact’s could very well determine whether we end up living as climate migrants or I get to spend my last days as a crotchety old writer who complains too much about all of the water sloshing around the streets of his hometown.
Ariza’s deeply personal stake in the fate of this very particular place sets this volume apart from some of the other recent and excellent books about sea level rise, including Rising by Elizabeth Rush—which I also strongly recommend.
In deftly depicting Miami’s real estate “growth machine,” Ariza doesn’t need to go far: his mother and stepfather have reinvented themselves at midlife as successful real estate brokers. They have two types of clients: those who are savvy to climate risk, and those who don’t understand just how bad things are likely to get. But there’s a third group of players who are having a huge impact on the South Florida real estate market, namely those who don’t have any incentive to care about the long term. These dynamics set the stage for what Ariza calls “the long con.” He observes that just as in the subprime mortgage bubble, legions of developers, brokers, and short-term traders are involved. They profit from deal flow, not long-term capital appreciation. Moreover, the market is flooded with offshore buyers, who are purchasing luxury real estate in Miami to use as second homes, and also as a way to park money in a presumably safe country. Fully 50 per cent of Miami’s luxury condominiums do not have full-time occupants. Ariza elicits the following extraordinary statement from a local real estate executive: “I just hope this thing is far enough away that we have at least five or six good business cycles left.” That’s the welcome mat greeting on the doorstep of this pump-and-dump version of capitalism, where someone is on the losing end of virtually every trade.
Meanwhile, in the real, non-luxury, non-tech-bro-smoothies-and-deals-by-the-pool world of Miami, “[s]ix in ten residents of the city are cost burdened, meaning they spend more than one-third of their income on housing. That’s the highest rate of any large metro area in the nation. Those cost-burdened renters are, generally, black and HIspanic service workers.” The minimum wage in Miami is $8.65 per hour. Many of the workers who power Miami’s tourism economy are barely able to afford air conditioning, which is increasingly necessary for health and survival in a climate that is growing ever hotter.
Ariza tells many stories in Disposable City, some of them picaresque. He rides out with python wranglers in the mangroves. He paddles the mangled estuary of the Miami River in a leaky kayak. He explores the possible fates of many things, from the Everglades to the seaside nuclear power plant to an idiotic highway extension project to the 100,000 septic systems that are already beginning to fail owing to higher water tables and more frequent flood tides. But his story about what is happening in the district called Little Haiti is especially significant and relevant for anyone who cares about low-lying coastal cities. It’s a story about the emerging fight for the high ground. Not the moral high ground. The literal high ground.
Miami includes a ridge with 15 feet of elevation, and Little Haiti sits atop that ridge. The area is not far north of other areas that have recently gentrified, including Wynwood and the Design District. Developers have been gradually buying up contiguous parcels in Little Haiti, and have amassed at least four holdings greater than the nine-acre threshold that allows them to bypass the City’s zoning and engage in total redevelopment. Ariza chronicles the planning process for the first of these proposed mixed-use projects: the billion-dollar Magic City Innovation District. The questions now arising in Little Haiti, and likewise in other cities up and down our seaboards, are profound. Is it inevitable that low-income residents will be priced out of their historic communities, as the value of high ground inexorably increases? Will there be an equitable way for our society to assist those dwelling on low ground to resettle safely? And with their tax bases exceedingly vulnerable to declines in coastal real estate values, how will cities adapt their revenue models to generate the billions that will be needed for mitigation, adaptation, and retreat?
Like many of the tales in Disposable City, the story of Little Haiti continues to unfold. This is why a book like this one is so valuable: it is a record, however partial, of a particular place at a particular time when everything is about to change, and when most people are beginning to realize that everything is about to change. We’ll likely go back to this book in ten, twenty, and fifty years, for clues about where Miami went wrong and what it got right. Ariza offers this sharp insight into the experience of climate change for people who have already experienced migration or displacement.
And now we have to face the fact that climate change may well force us to scatter again, as we were scattered once before. Once you see that truth, the anticipatory grief touches everything that you do in this city. It spikes your cafecito with a shot of sadness. It casts a pall over the brightest days you spend at the beach. It alters your circle of friendships, drawing you to others who can see what’s coming who can share its weight with you.
There are so many vibrant characters ready to share that weight on the stage Ariza’s sets. And the play is only beginning. I Googled one of them yesterday: Jane Gilbert. She was recently named to a new post in Miami: Chief Heat Officer. Think about that for a moment. I also searched for photos of the historic house of refuge in Stuart where we gathered for that potluck in 2018. Then I looked up the structure on NOAA’s Sea Level Rise viewer. It might possibly survive 3 to 6 feet of sea level rise, but the road leading to it almost certainly will not. And Mike Meier, the urban farmer and café operator whom we interviewed back in January of 2018, isn’t sitting idly by. He recently ran for mayor of Stuart, on a platform of affordable housing and climate change adaptation. Reader, he won.
Other Voices, Other Forms
Miami artist Xavier Cortada has a practice of participatory art that is engaged with themes of climate and environment. He has journeyed to each (melting) pole to plant a green flag, and he has worked to raise awareness of sea level rise in Miami. In one project he has created distinctive lawn signs, which allow residents to show how many feet of additional sea level rise would cause their properties to flood. The participants have formed a group called the Underwater Homeowner’s Association.
Poem of the Week
Poet Richard Blanco was raised in Miami. I love this evocation of the lunch counter at a Cuban market in Miami.
For Your Reading Radar
The estimable John Williams of the New York Times calls Albert and the Whale, by Philip Hoare, “a summary-defying blend of art history, biography, nature writing and memoir.” Hoare, who could likely write with wit and erudition about any topic while hanging upside down from the monkey bars at your local playground, has developed an extremely fruitful obsession with whales. This is his third book concerned with the cetaceous, and it takes off from the great German artist Albrecht Dürer’s failed attempt to view a dead whale. For those of you who love art history and the connectedness of things across time, this book might just be for you.
For Your Calendar
The Brooklyn Public Library hosts a Climate Reads series, and this month they will focus on the short story collection Florida, by Lauren Groff. The conversation, on Tuesday May 25th at 7 PM Eastern, will be hosted by another excellent Florida writer, Sarah Gerard.
Indie Bookstore of the Week
This week we are featuring Books and Books, which operates six locations in the Miami area and one in Key West. Owner Mitchell Kaplan is the founder of the Miami Book Fair.
That’s it for this week. Happy Mother’s Day! xo Nicie
P. S. — Perhaps you might consider supporting Frugal Chariot by giving a gift subscription to a great mother in your life. We have a piquant logo in the works, and stickers will be on their way to subscribers this summer.