Black Miami Is on the Frontline of Climate Displacement

This is the second story in a series on “climate gentrification.” Support for this series was provided by The Neal Peirce Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting journalism on ways to make cities and their larger regions work better for all people.

MIAMI — By the time Latonya Floyd came outside, the photographer’s lens was already pointed toward her family’s home.

There was “no knock, no hello,” she said.

When she asked what he was doing, he replied that he was “just getting pictures of the property,” for his boss, a real estate investor.

The Floyds had lived in that house for three generations, through racial uprisings in the 1960s, ’80s, and in 2020, the crack cocaine epidemic, and all that came with being called “the hood.” They were not selling.

Soon after, her parents installed the fence she’d long asked for.

Before, neighbors cut through the yard on their way to church, kids drifted between houses without knocking, and Sunday dinners stretched across porches and into the street. Now, a locked gate stands where people once walked freely.

What felt like rudeness that day was part of something larger and tied to climate change.

Miami now leads the nation in home purchases paid for in all cash, with investors showing up unsolicited and buying out longtime Black-owned homes. It’s partly because with rising seas threatening oceanfront properties, developers and wealthier residents are rebranding inland, long-neglected Black neighborhoods like Floyd’s as the new safe bet.

Since 2023, half the houses on her block have sold, including the pastel mint one next door. Three doors down, a rental that went for $800 a month in 2021 now asks for $2,200.

The process has a name: climate gentrification.

Miami’s Black neighborhoods sit on a natural limestone ridge about 8 feet above the coastline, and as floods intensify and fears around sea level rise grow, wealthier residents along the water are moving uphill toward them. It is pricing out Black residents and pushing them into other lower, more flood-prone areas.

Already, in less than 15 years, the city’s share of Black residents has dropped to roughly 10% from about 17%.

“It is crazy to think that [climate change] is a part of the shift we’re seeing, the gentrification,” Floyd said.

The truth is, this may become routine all across the country. By the end of the century, researchers estimate that climate events will force more Americans from their homes than the Great Migration. Across Miami’s metro area, more than 1 million people may be displaced.

For some, the future looks like a foregone conclusion. But in Miami’s Black neighborhoods, residents are trying to show it doesn’t have to be. They want to turn their fight to stay put into a playbook for other coastal communities.

Groups like Struggle for Miami’s Affordable and Sustainable Housing and long-standing formations such as Power U and the Right to the City Alliance are building community land trusts, fighting evictions, and pushing the city to write equitable development practices into its climate and housing plans. They want a climate future where the blocks Black Miamians struggled to attain remain theirs and become cooler, safer, and more affordable for everyone, not just for those with the money to move uphill.

Nikki Floyd’s Miami community is on the front lines of climate gentrification, as property investors search for land on higher elevation. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

Climate fears make Miami’s Black families the face of gentrification

The night Hurricane Andrew came ashore in August 1992, there was a belief that it could kill the city. In some ways, it did.

It was just the third ever tropical cyclone to make landfall in the continental U.S. as a Category 5. Fifty-four people died on the coast.

South toward Biscayne Bay and Homestead, the landscape looked like a bomb had gone off, whole blocks scoured down to their concrete slabs.

Inland, in Overtown, the grid of streets and shotgun homes Floyd grew up wandering with cousins and friends was battered with shattered windows and downed power lines — but intact. “Hurricane Andrew was a monster,” she said. “But it wasn’t the same here” as along the coast.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency provided food, water, clothing, and temporary housing for those who were affected by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. One million people were evacuated and 54 died in the hurricane. (FEMA Photos by Bob Epstein/Released)

The climate safety in Black neighborhoods was not intentional, but it also wasn’t accidental.

Long before anyone put the words “climate gentrification” together, Miami officials placed the railroad and industrial sites inland, and then in the 1930s pinned Black neighborhoods to them — and the pollution that came with it.

Floyd’s father, John, calls their block the “dust bowl” because of the smog and dust that chokes the neighborhood, which is wedged between a cement plant and the railroad tracks.

The location spared these places from Andrew, but it was seen as undesirable enough to relegate Black residents to because of industry’s presence, said Terrance Cribbs-Lorrant, a Black historian in Overtown. “We’re on a ridge and higher to protect the railroad and industry, not us.”

Many of the city’s Black neighborhoods are connected by environmental racism, he said. Further north, Miami’s Liberty City, Little River, and Little Haiti neighborhoods grew as environmental and housing conditions began to push Black people from the overcrowded Overtown neighborhood.

These neighborhoods flourished for a time, but by the 1950s white developers began buying land from Black families, converting owner-occupied homes into rentals and slowly flipping the balance from ownership to tenancy. In Overtown, construction of a freeway in the late 1960s sliced through its heart, displacing thousands more and hollowing out the tax base, even as Black residents continued to anchor churches, clubs, and corner stores in the blocks that remained.

A series of photos from the Bob Simms Collection illustrates Black life in Miami from the 1950s through the 1980s. (Courtesy of the University of Miami Library)

Those choices trickle into the present every time a storm swirls offshore or a condo tower appears at the edge of a playground. When Nicole Crooks moved her family to Overtown in 2011, she didn’t have a name for the process that had priced her out of Coconut Grove — the city’s first Black community, also perched above sea level and ground zero for Black displacement years ago.

“I didn’t know that the reason for that was climate gentrification,” she said. “I just knew I was able to find what they considered affordable housing here in Overtown.”

A kayak in the streets of Miami in 2009 after there were several inches of rain, which coincided with tidal effects and a lack of drainage. (maxstrz on Flickr via Wikimedia Commons)

By then, developers and institutional investors had already begun assembling land across the ridge. In recent years, billionaire Sarkis Izmirlian paid more than $6 million for a deteriorating convenience store in Overtown, three Miami firms spent $16.5 million to lock down a site known as Block 19, and the $1 billion Magic City Innovation District is taking shape in nearby Little Haiti.

In Overtown, families are facing eviction notices and selling homes under growing pressure from taxes and heavy-pocketed investors.

On Floyd’s block, property values have doubled in just two years, and with them, an economic desire for new homeowners. Families who’ve been here for decades pay only a few hundred dollars a year in property taxes; newcomers pay nearly $10,000 to claim a piece of higher ground.

Recently, she said, the pressure to leave has grown more aggressive, in ways that feel less like market forces and more like racism.

One Sunday last spring, Floyd’s 7-year-old nephew, Brayden, ran inside shouting for her to “look at the wall.” Outside, a mural of Black leaders had been defaced with a swastika and the N-word scrawled beside it.

The graffiti was a “message,” Crooks said, about who the neighborhood was now for — and who it wasn’t. Black people “carved safety and belonging in a hostile place,” she said, only to be told now that the ground beneath them is too valuable for them to stay.

Insurance is one of the main reasons for this flush of investments attracting new people to Black neighborhoods. While Andrew did not immediately obliterate Miami, it did sort the city into places the market decided were expendable and places it would later learn to covet.

After Andrew, more than 63,000 homes were severely damaged across Miami’s shoreline. Within a year, 11 Florida insurers had gone insolvent and 17 more, including State Farm and Allstate, were canceling coastal policyholders or pulling out of the state entirely. The companies that stayed tripled their reinsurance rates and rewrote their risk models.

That was the first reset.

Three decades later, a second reset is underway. Florida’s home insurance costs have nearly doubled since 2014, and along Miami’s coasts, premiums could quadruple by 2055 — the highest in any U.S. city.

By 2055, sea levels along Miami’s coast are projected to rise by a foot. Floods that once came once a century could arrive every year. As insurance costs spike, the search for cheaper, safer homes by wealthier people is, in part, a “market response” to this future. But the local government, in some ways, has also incentivized this shift.

A long-standing restaurant in Little Haiti. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

Miami’s climate plan, MiamiForever Climate Ready, explicitly calls for new “development along transit corridors in areas less susceptible to flooding.”

Miami-Dade County has acknowledged that its climate investments in historically marginalized neighborhoods raise property values “without keeping cost-of-living in check.” At the same time, they are exploring ways to keep coastal housing affordable so residents are less likely to flee to inland neighborhoods.

The county’s top property appraiser, Tomás Regalado, is pushing to bake climate risk into tax assessments by lowering values for some coastal properties facing more frequent floods and sea-level rise.

“We have to reduce the property value if we need to,” he said. His push could slow tax increases for some homeowners to keep staying on the coast more enticing, but it could lower the city’s public budget.

A climate solution: keeping people in their homes

A dozen longtime Black residents sat around a gleaming conference table inside a new high-rise in Overtown, looking out through floor‑to‑ceiling windows at the neighborhood they’d grown up in. They had come for a community meeting about the changes unfolding on their blocks. Not a single new tenant from the building showed up.

The complex’s manager told Capital B that he estimated that “99%” of renters in the new building were not from the area.

Construction of new luxury high-rises comes in 24‑hour bursts — drilling at three in the morning, bangs that jolt elders from sleep — in a rush to bring in new residents who will “never have to learn the culture of the place they’re moving into,” Crooks said, before attending the community meeting.

For the people already being displaced from Overtown and other Black inland neighborhoods, many are heading toward those places destroyed by Andrew in 1992. Others are leaving Miami-Dade entirely.

Between July 2023 and July 2024, Miami lost 67,000 people, the largest of any high-flood-risk county in the country. But those routes are for people with enough money and mobility to choose.

A three bedroom home in Little Haiti sits for rent at $2,800 per month or $33,600 annually. The average household income in this neighborhood is $28,000 annually, according to the federal government. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

Today, more than 8 out of 10 residents in Miami’s Black neighborhoods are renters — double the metro rate — leaving most households at the mercy of rising rents and landlord decisions in the most unaffordable city for renters in America.

“We’re pushing people to rent and there should be more accountability to own and pass down an inheritance,” Cribbs-Lorrant said. “The rent’s going up and you’re not able to save or move up.”

Trenise Bryant, another advocate, has seen this play out in Liberty City already. She helps lead Struggle for Miami’s Affordable and Sustainable Housing, or SMASH.

The work started unglamorously: tenants meeting in cramped living rooms to compare rent hikes and mold, elders pulling out stacks of code violation notices, and parents trading tips on how to keep the lights on. It was first about “confronting slumlords and showing up at city hearings,” she told Capital B. But now it also does something more radical: It buys land under people’s homes and tucks it into a community land trust, so outsiders can’t flip it with the next climate model.

The work has already been hit hard. Since 2017, the median rental price in her neighborhood has almost tripled and the Black population has nearly been cut in half.

Displaced residents are doubling up with family in already crowded apartments. Others are sleeping in their cars or renting storage units between shifts.

“We’re talking about Black people who go to work and are still unhoused,” Crooks said. “Families sleeping in their cars with their children.”

Black Miamians aren’t alone. Across the nation, no racial or ethnic group has been displaced by gentrification more than Black people. Since 1980, gentrified neighborhoods have lost half a million Black people, while those same neighborhoods have seen more than 3 million new Latino, Asian, and white residents move in.

The modes of displacement, or “replacement,” can start small, Floyd said. Recently, a yoga studio opened a few blocks from the family home, in a storefront where neighbors used to pay bills and wire money to relatives, drawing a new crowd that treats the block like a “discovery.”

“You start getting different kinds of people who don’t care about the place,” she said.

Trenise Bryant is one of the leaders of Struggle for Miami’s Affordable and Sustainable Housing, or SMASH. (Courtesy of SMASH)

When Bryant talks about climate gentrification, she starts instead with the air pressing down on people who haven’t disappeared. She thinks of the summers when heat hangs over the asphalt for weeks, neighbors faint at bus stops, and kids can’t sleep because their window units have given out. The people “sleeping in the park” are not a separate issue from the “men making unsolicited cash offers on houses a few blocks away,” she said.

SMASH’s model starts with these people, ages 9 to 72. Residents of the cooperative spend hours making phone calls, door knocking, and reaching out to others in the community. In exchange, they are offered housing in a co-housing property operated by the organization.

So far, SMASH’s land trust has received around $1 million in financing from the Florida Community Loan Fund to acquire and rehabilitate multifamily housing, resulting in at least nine units of affordable housing.

But capital for its most ambitious projects is still hard to find. “If we had more resources to build more cooperative housing, we’d be able to take homeless folks off the streets when it’s 105 in the summer, or when it’s in the 30s in the winter,” she said.

Under SMASH’s community land trust model, the homeowner will receive a 51% share of the home. To purchase a $600,000 home, for example, the homeowner would pay $306,000 and the impact investors would cover the remainder. At current Liberty City median prices and investor speculation pace, acquiring even 50 homes would require tens of millions in capital.

This is a tiny foothold in a neighborhood where investors are buying properties by the block.

A former public housing complex in a historic Black neighborhood is demolished for new, mixed-income housing. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)

Overtown holds on

A block from the defaced mural, Floyd stood outside with her neighbors in March. A tray of conch balls, a deep-fried Black Miamian delicacy, traded hands. The smell of shellfish drifted even this far from the water.

The “conch man,” Ken Mahoney, had dragged out a folding table and a cooler stocked with sodas and beers. Cars rolled past slowly, music spilled out, and neighbors called out to one another.

Everyone gathered called her nephew Brayden, “nephew,” too. Out here, she explained, everyone still claimed each other in some way — “cousin, auntie, somebody’s people.”