5
Reporting from Miami: An economic roundtable with Jeremy Hobson
Reporting from WLRN's studio in Miami, Marketplace host Jeremy Hobson holds a roundtable discussion.
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
Is Miami the city of the future? What economic challenges does it face going forward? In a roundtable discussion with host Jeremy Hobson, Miami residents Paola Iuspa-Abbott, Andrea Heuson and Dan Grech weigh in.
"Miami is halfway between the developed and the developing world," says Dan Grech, formerly of Marketplace and now the news director at WLRN Miami Herald News."The distance between the poor and the rich here is probably closer to Cartagena, Managua, Buenos Aries, than New York or even Los Angeles."
But according to Grech that class discrepancy also gives Miami a unique entrepreneurial edge that doesn't exist in other parts of the U.S. "Poor people tend to be entrepreneurs, because they can't make a living in the normal traditional way. And with the kind of job loss we've seen in Florida, I think entrepreneurship is heavy here."
Andrea Heuson, a professor of finance at the University of Miami, thinks Miami stands alone in its recent housing market recovery as well. "Having lived through the previous condo boom and bust that we had in the 1980s, I saw how long it took to recover from that," says Heuson, "and I see how little time it's taken our real estate markets, both residential and commercial, to recover from the most recent downturn.
"In all of the major segments of the real estate market vacancies are down, rents are up, people are happy, standing room only."
Daily Business Review reporter Paola Iuspa-Abbott attributes that growth to what she says is known as the South American business model.
During the housing crisis when financing wasn't available for potential buyers or potential builders, Iuspa-Abbott says Miami developers looked to South American countries for a new model. In places like Argentina, where there isn't a culture of borrowing to buy a home, developers discovered that people pay cash.
"They said, 'oh fantastic,'" explains Iuspa-Abbott, "so that's what we're going to do. We're going to copy the model where ... people gave a fat down payment. We're going to use part of that down payment to fund the construction, to pay for the construction of the project, and then we get the remaining of the money at the closing.'"
Bigger down payments meant less risk for developer, and the buildings continued to go up. But if the city is to continue to grow and live up to Mayor Tomás Regalado's prediction -- that "Miami is what the United States will be in 25 to 30 years" -- then all three panelists agree there are major economic issues to address first. Among them are the city's struggling public education system, insufficient public transportation, rising sea-level threats, and the city's great wealth and poverty divide.
"Some of the most expensive condos ever built are being built right now," says Iuspa-Abbott. "You have projects where the cheapest condo is 4 million or 1 million, but then you have 50,000 people on the waiting list for public housing, so if Miami is the city of the future, I hope that is corrected, because we want a perfect future, not an imperfect future."
I am a huge fan of Marketplace, but this discussion was absolutely terrible. The depth of analysis was as shallow as Miami's image as a great city. Despite acknowledging the brain drain and lack of jobs for highly skilled individuals, the panel then highlights the minimum wage economy in Miami (tourism and hospitality) as a plus due to its likelihood to grow! Later a woman with a masters degree is advised to work harder to find a job, again after acknowledging the lack of proper job opportunities for employees with her credentials? Give me a break.
This panel absolutely failed to connect the dots of its own points and draw serious conclusions about the condition of the city and its economy. This conversation played out more like a PR opportunity for Miami rather than a serious discussion. Mayor Regelado is correct, Miami IS the city of the future: Fewer high paying, high skill jobs, more and more low wage service sector jobs, threatened by sea-level rise.
I won't hold this against Marketplace as your program is typically insightful and well thought out. But please never invite these guests back again, for all our sakes.
Visit youtube.com/user/djdiscourse for insightful interviews on HipHop and politics.
DJDISCourse.com
After listening to this program, my deepest hope for America is that Miami is NOT the model for the city of the future. I felt connected to this report because I had lived in Miami while completing my masters degree at the University of Miami and because I had left Miami to find work and ended up in Vero Beach. And if that wasn’t enough, my wife had shared classes at NSU with the student (Natalie sp.) that had been interviewed on the program a few days earlier. I have lived all over the world and in several cities across the United States and enjoy learning about diverse cultures. I have been happily married to an immigrant from Central America and I speak Spanish. I have traveled extensively in Latin America and enjoy many aspects of Hispanic culture. However, after living in Miami for three years and making numerous return visits, I am convinced that Miami is the most dysfunctional city in the United States.
I won’t claim to be an expert on why this is so but merely to provide observations as someone that has lived in the city and as someone that has lived in other cities, communities and even other countries. My observations are the reasons why Miami should not be the model for the “City of the Future”.
The rudeness, impatience and arrogance of the general population in Miami is unmatched by anyplace else I have ever lived or visited. I want to qualify this statement by saying that I also met some very nice people in Miami, but as a whole, the residents of Miami need some serious lessons in manners.
Traffic is horrendous and Miami drivers are reckless and careless. The transportation infrastructure is completely insufficient and often illogical. For example, the express lanes that have been created on I-95 actually have the result of slowing down overall traffic flow. There are multiple freeway interchanges in the city that have been bottlenecks for decades and should have been improved as the city grew, but the city/county never seems to address these problems. I have driven through areas marked as construction zones when I first moved to Miami. I never saw any ongoing construction. Ten years later, I drove through the same construction zone and no work had been done. There are numerous major thoroughfares where the street signs and signs for exits are not visible because a tree limb covers up the sign. In fifteen years, no one from the City or County works can trim a branch so that an exit sign is visible?
The disparity between the high cost of housing and low salaries will never allow Miami to move into the future and become a great city. Immigrants come to Miami because they either have no job or low wages in their home country. In Miami there is a surplus of labor accustomed to working for low wages. Why would a business owner pay anything other than a minimum salary when there is always someone willing to take the job.
One glaring observation that I have to make, and I apologize if I offend anyone, is that it seems like many of the immigrants that come to Miami for “a better life”, instead of trying to assimilate into American culture as a whole, put more energy into holding onto their home culture and imposing it on their new home. This has the effect of making Miami more like an impoverished third world city rather than a city of the future. Having traveled and lived overseas as an expatriate, I know the feeling of dislocation when settling in a new environment. I know the loneliness and the homesickness that one can get and I know the importance of holding onto one’s cultural heritage. But in Miami, the vibe that I often felt was that “if you are not Cuban, you don’t belong here”. I now live in San Antonio, Texas, a city that also has a strong Hispanic cultural influence but I have not experienced the feeling “if you are not Mexican, you don’t belong here”. Here in San Antonio, everyone speaks English in public. In contrast, I remember going to a grocery store on Key Biscayne near Miami and hearing two Hispanic clerks talking among themselves in English. When I approached them with a question, they responded in Spanish, refused to speak English and claimed to not understand or speak English.
As part of the presentation, a representative from the business community bemoaned the lack of educated, qualified labor to fill their positions. Miami, and the rest of the country are full of educated, qualified, motivated and unemployed individuals seeking careers that offer salaries that reflect their qualifications. Employers set their prerequisite qualifications and experience requirements in the clouds and then expect the employee to work for a salary that is in the dirt. Remember the old saying “You get what you pay for”! After losing my research job in Vero Beach, Florida in 2011, I searched for another good paying job in South Florida for a year and a half. As a candidate possessing a master’s degree, ten years experience in my field and impeccable references from leaders in my field, I became discouraged by the lack of opportunities for someone with my qualifications and thoroughly disgusted by the low salaries offered by prospective employers in both the public and private sectors. In search of a better future, my wife and I made the decision to leave Florida altogether. In our new location, I have already found a good paying job and my wife has just started in a position where she can use her business degree and grow her career. It has been a long, difficult process but we both know that we made the right decision and are both looking forward to a prosperous future.
For any listener that is buying into the fairy tale that Miami is the city of the future, I urge you not to move there. Yes Miami is glamorized on TV and in the movies and on a positive note it is one of the prettiest most scenic cities I have seen in the US. The beaches are beautiful and full of beautiful people. You can’t beat the weather in the winter. But Miami is a city where beauty is only skin deep. Beneath its glossy exterior is a city with no soul, no identity and no pride. Having lived there, my impression is that Miami is characterized by what we don’t want our cities to be like. Perhaps the program should have focused on Austin, Texas or Portland, Oregon to get a better idea of what we want our cities to be like in the future. After living in Miami, I decided that the abbreviation for the city, MIA, stood for Maximum Inconvenience & Aggravation. While I still have fond memories of the RSMAS Wetlab and breakfasts at Sergios, I would not recommend anyone to move to Miami. My advice to Natalie sp. is that if she wants to find a job and use her degree then she should get out of Florida.
I have lived in Miami for over ten years and I have witness a steady decline in education, transportation and city infrastructure, and poor leadership in the political arena. If you base your economy on the Hospitality industry and Real Estate without a fall back then you're opening yourself up to failure. Our narrow minded elected official lack the sophistication, fortitude, focus, leadership and ability to create a consensus. Miami's economy is geared towards the individuals who can pay to play. What is needed for Miami to become world class is to educate it's citizen, elect forward thinking politicians and create an economy that doesn't just rely on hospitality and real estate. If Miami does not address the ethic inadequacies and racial discrepancies and make everything fair then Miami will never become an economic force. Thank you Marketplace for shining the national spot light on an facade that Miami has created.
So is there no critical evaluation in journalism? You assemble a collection of self serving liberal latte sippers and treat the nonsense they spout as credible truth. Spare me, the issue in Liberty is a culture of victim mentality supported by public dollars. It is easy to make it in Miami, look at the unemployment rate. And no, you don't have to speak Spanish.
WLRN is my NPR station and the round table was lacking in my opinion of their analysis. The panel didn't even mention the transient population as being an impediment to the economy here. Hospitality is a big part of the economy and the drying up of economic activity with the seasons is a burden along with the lower wages those jobs bring, leaving many workers to find jobs else where creating a bigger hole. One panel member made a valid point of transportation infrastructure being a pitfall as well. Global warming is not as big of an everyday problem as another panel member mentioned giving the example of roads breaking down along the coast as a recent problem. That's been a problem since the area was founded. Wages and stable, full time jobs are what's lacking in the South Florida economy. Glad my favorite show came to my town.
