Federal officials are actively investigating an unfair housing complaint that accuses the City of Miami of enacting discriminatory planning and zoning policies that led to the mass eviction and displacement of hundreds of Black residents in the West Grove.
An attorney involved in the case told community members this month that investigators from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had requested additional documents, interviewed a former resident who was evicted, and reviewed proposed remedies suggested by three organizations that brought the complaint.
“They are waiting for us to come back with a list of priorities,” Berbeth Foster, a senior attorney with the Community Justice Project in Miami, told a meeting of the Coconut Grove Ministerial Alliance on Saturday December 7.
Foster said she expected HUD investigators to share those priorities with city officials and that discussions and negotiations among the parties would proceed from there.
Miami City Attorney George Wysong did not respond to questions about the case.
HUD investigators have yet to interview Miami officials, Foster said, but they have spoken with Akinshimaya Nnamdi, a former Coconut Grove resident whose eviction from a Grand Avenue apartment crystalizes the allegations made in the complaint.
Nnamdi and her mother were evicted from their West Grove apartment in 2017.
Six years earlier, the City of Miami rezoned six blocks of Grand Avenue between Plaza and Margaret Streets, including the property where Nnamdi lived, to greenlight a massive redevelopment project.
Nnamdi’s apartment building was subsequently sold and knocked down. Today, the property at 3471 Grand Avenue stands empty and Nnamdi lives in Miami Gardens.
“I do my best to stay connected,” Nnamdi says today. Friends and former neighbors were displaced as well and are now scattered across South Florida, she says. “These are the people I went to school with. It’s weird not to have that community.”
After leaving the neighborhood, Nnamdi studied at Florida International University and the University of Miami, where her doctoral dissertation focused on the displacement of Black residents from the West Grove and Liberty City.
“As a scholar who is focused on bringing light to that situation, I am also bringing light to my own situation,” Nnamdi said. Her apartment building, with nine units, was part of a larger pattern across the neighborhood, she says.
“This small, fractured displacement that goes on, it doesn’t necessarily get tracked,” she says. “The world didn’t necessarily see it, but the people in the neighborhood saw it.”
Hundreds of other Black residents living on or near Grand Avenue were pushed out of the neighborhood as well because of the unfair and discriminatory land-use and zoning policies put in place by the City of Miami over the past 14 years, the complaint alleges.
Those policies incentivized developers to acquire and demolish 18 multi-family residential building in the West Grove, displacing at least 162 people and hollowing out the neighborhood, in violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the complaint contends.
“We have lived the complaint for so long,” said Reynold Martin, the board chair of GRACE (Grove Rights and Community Equity) who was born and raised in the Grove. “There are so many people that I grew up with that have left the Grove.”
The Fair Housing Act prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of race. In the case of the West Grove, the City of Miami’s policies had a “disparate” impact on Black residents, the complaint says, and reinforced segregated housing patterns by pushing residents into other segregated communities.
The complaint was submitted to HUD’s regional office in Atlanta in July 2023 by two attorneys – Alexander Rundlet at the University of Miami’s Center for Ethics and Public Service and Nerlande Joseph from the Community Justice Project.
Both attorneys say the case breaks new ground. “These are new issues,” Joseph said. “This is us, saying to HUD, hey, look what’s going on.”
Nnamdi is one of the named complainants, along with three West Grove organizations: the Coconut Grove Ministerial Alliance, the Coconut Grove Village West Homeowners and Tenants Association (HOATA), and GRACE.
The attorneys went public with their complaint in July of this year, after federal officials began their investigation. A HUD spokeswoman declined to comment on the case.
The complaint focuses on six blocks of Grand Avenue between Margaret Street and Plaza Street where Coconut Grove developer Peter Gardner once planned to build a mixed-use development known as Grove Village.
The City of Miami approved a major use special permit (MUSP) in 2011 to advance the project, which Gardner was proposing at the time, but the development stalled amid a building moratorium and an economic downturn.
Many of the older multi-family apartment buildings that lined that stretch of Grand Avenue were torn down nonetheless, displacing long-term residents.
“What I witnessed was heartbreaking because people had to move away. We lost a lot of residents as a result, which has been reflected in our local church membership, and also in our schools,” Clarice Cooper of HOATA told the Spotlight.
“That’s what made it (Grand Avenue) seem like a ghost town,” she added.
The impact of Miami’s policies on the Black residents of West Grove was not only predictable, but preventable, the complaint says. “The City of Miami’s purported planning and redevelopment objectives can be met by other, less discriminatory means,” the complaint states.
City officials have refused to consider potential remedies suggested by community groups, including the adoption of “inclusionary” zoning, compensation for displaced tenants, and granting a “right to return” preference to former residents in future residential projects, the complaint adds.
In recent months, a development partnership that includes Gardner announced plans for three new projects on Grand Avenue, including two mixed-use residential buildings with 202 apartments and a Class A office building.
The apartments will be offered at market rate. Martin and others would like to see the City of Miami require developers to offer housing at a price point within reach of the neighborhood’s low-income residents.
“A step in the right direction,” Martin says, “So there would continue to be a sense of community, not the forced exodus of a community.”
Nnamdi agrees.
“I am a parent now, so I talk about my child growing up in the neighborhood, but that is not a reality now. The neighborhood is not affordable to me,” Nnamdi says.
Still, she’s hopeful.
“At the end of the day, my hope is that things can be improved to make some place for the people who actually live there.”
