Miami keeps courting billionaires while pricing out the people who built this city | Opinion

Valencia Gunder, Oct 8, 2026

Miami has become great at attracting wealth. Luxury towers reshape historically Black and working-class communities from Liberty City and Brownsville to Naranja and all of South Dade. Condominiums, hotels and restaurants are marketed as progress, fueled by wealthy and middle-class newcomers from New York, California, the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe.

But what does this influx produce for the people already here? In May, the Miami Herald Editorial Board welcomed Citadel’s Brickell expansion while asking whether residents would benefit. Attracting billionaires, corporations and investment does not automatically create shared prosperity.

As Miami-Dade closes another budget season, the question is larger than whether the county can balance a $14.26 billion plan. It is whether our elected officials have the political will, imagination and fiscal courage to protect people being priced out and economically extracted from in one of America’s wealthiest metropolitan regions. Our commissioners account for billions but fail to ensure those dollars build community wealth. The budget decides contracts, infrastructure, business opportunity and public land.

Miami-Dade issues bonds, pays debt service, invests public funds and selects institutions to underwrite and manage them. These decisions determine which projects receive capital, which financial firms profit and whether wealth circulates locally or flows out. The question is not only how much the government spends, but whose wealth it preserves and grows. For Black and working-class Miami, these choices carry history. Our communities endured segregation, red-lining, highway construction, urban renewal, exclusion from capital and decades of disinvestment. Now, after generations of being treated as unworthy of investment, our neighborhoods are considered valuable enough to redevelop and displace the people who sustained them.

We continue to see rising costs in rent, groceries and gas, leaving people living paycheck to paycheck or one paycheck away from losing everything. Public land is part of that equation. When public land is sold or transferred to private developers, the true cost cannot be measured by the sale price alone. The community loses control of a public asset, its future value and the opportunity to use that land for community needs. The long-term consequences can include displacement, rising rents, higher property values and the loss of land that could have supported permanently affordable housing or other community needs. Apartments labeled “affordable” at 80% of Area Median Income often remain out of reach for minimum-wage workers and do not reflect what many families actually earn or what it costs them to survive. If the people who built and sustained these communities cannot afford the new homes being developed there, then those homes were never truly built for us. Infrastructure investment must include protections for the people who already live there.

Public dollars should support affordable housing based on the actual incomes of impacted communities, relief for longtime homeowners, stronger tenant protections and community ownership and wealth-building models that allow residents to become owners of local homes, land and businesses. Displacement unfolds over decades, and its consequences can affect families and communities for generations. New approaches should be carefully tested, publicly evaluated and expanded when they produce lasting benefits for residents. Fiscal responsibility should not mean austerity or continuing systems that displace people. It should mean using public resources wisely to build community wealth, preserve public ownership and ensure public assets continue serving the public for generations. These matters are the budget. Every allocation decides who receives resources, who gains ownership and who bears the cost. Miami’s skyline is not proof that our communities are prospering. It proves enormous wealth can accumulate while the people who built this county are pushed out.

Miami-Dade must stop protecting wealth at the top while managing scarcity for everyone else. The people are tired of developments we cannot afford, contracts our businesses cannot access and public investments that price us out. The people who built Miami deserve to remain, own what they helped create and pass their community on to the next generation.

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Valencia “Vee” Gunder is executive director of The Black Collective.

Source | Miami Herald