Miami for sale
MIAMI-. Happy times are here again! Or so it would seem from the current construction boom underway in Miami. The skyline of the city is being transformed seemingly by the day. Developers are thrilled. High-rise, extremely pricey condominiums are sprouting up like wildflowers–or weeds–all over the place. Mega commercial development projects are being planned as well. They are being green-lighted by politicians and regulators even when they don’t meet building and zoning codes.
Construction is back at last after the long slump that began in 2008 with the Great Recession and the collapse of the real estate market. With all this new building you might think that construction workers are finally raking it in after so many lean years. Actually, in Miami wages for construction work are falling
How is this divergence from capitalism’s holy grail–the law of supply and demand–come about? As a story in the Miami Herald recently documented, many builders rob their workers blind. They do it in an amazing number of ways, many of them illegal. They fail to pay the stipulated wage rate. They don’t pay for overtime. Most egregious of all, some employers demand workers kick back part of their earnings to themor lose their job. Happy times are here again indeed–but only for a few.
None of this is unique to Miami. The U.S. labor market is far from having fully recovered. There are many workers who have been unemployed for a very long time. A good proportion of these are desperate for any kind of job. This puts employers in the cat bird’s seat. Still, employers in Miami have the additional advantage that here a very large proportion of the unskilled or semi-skilled labor force is made up of immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, people especially vulnerable to exploitation.
But there is a larger context to the story of feast at the top and famine at the bottom that characterizes this latest construction craze. Our story is an especially transparent and extreme variation on what has been happening in the country as a whole for the last four decades.
It wasn’t always that way, nor does it have to be in the future. From 1947 to 1973, U.S. worker’s wages grew almost as fast as their productivity. This was the era of shared prosperity. In contrast, from 1973 to 2013, worker productivity increased even faster than in the previous period but their wages grew less than half as much. We have transitioned from Lyndon Johnson’s dream of a Great Society to George W. Bush’s and Paul Ryan’s nightmarish Great Inequality.
The Great Inequality is felt especially acutely in Miami. One reason is Miami’s proximity to Latin America, and not just geographically, culturally or linguistically. It’s also a question of ideology and mentality.
Latin America is the region of the world with the greatest level of inequality. That level of inequality is bound to generate tremendous political blowback. The electoral rise of politicians with distinct agendas but basically originating in the left, from Lula to Hugo Chavez to Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, is one consequence of this dynamic. So is the dramatic rise in criminal violence, especially kidnapping and the drug trade, crimes motivated by the quest for the kind of money rich Latin Americans already enjoy. Bilingual Miami, home to the largest concentration of conservative Latin Americans in the United States, is a safe and welcoming haven for those yearning to breathe free from socialist leaders and gangster-style income redistribution.
Much of the current construction boom is fueled by these people’s fears and money as well as the wealth of Russian oligarchs and numerous other dubious characters from all corners of the world. The beneficiaries of the Great American Inequality, eager to trade some of their vast wealth for a little more sun and fun, have also played a role in reinvigorating the high-end housing market.
There is, finally, a deeper and more insidious way than merely monopolizing vertical space and the views it affords. through which the rich are appropriating the city. The phenomenon is hardly unprecedented in this country’s urban history. But the speed at which it has been coming about in Miami may be.
I am talking about the colossal exercise in ego which consists of donating a sizable chunk of money in exchange for having your name inscribed on an iconic building, say the city’s main art museum or performing arts center. In fact, however, in every case taxpayers pay a significantly larger proportion of the bill for these edifices than the benefactors. But the names of these citizens, never mind those who actually laid the foundation, installed the plumbing, or did the electrical work, don’t get to appear on a single brick.
Miami is for sale, brick, mortar, and soul. Maybe one day some trillion dollar man or woman will want to buy the whole thing. Call it Sam Walton City on the Bay. We are almost there.
