I’ve grown up in cities and have heard the history of many cities in North America, and what cities often have in common is that they are either built on the back of immigrants or slave labour. And then these people were forced to live in areas that at the time were deemed less desirable. But then when the property became desirable, whether to create a Central Park or just more market demand, they pushed the residents out of the community they initially blocked them into. Katja Esson’s Razing Liberty Square looks at one specific community and development project in Miami, but while the specificity of this is of the Black community in Liberty Square’s experience, the ripples of this kind of razing of communities under the guise of “improvement” is widespread. One of the highlights of the documentary is Valencia Gunder, a climate justice advocate, who succinctly illustrates the concept in connection with climate change and Liberty Square/City.
From the title alone with “razing” in it, you know that any spin the developers are giving in the early parts of the documentary is just that, spin, whether they believe it or not. Aaron is the most complex person on the development team, brought onto the team because he was raised in Liberty City (the community around Liberty Square) and you can see he’s trying to believe what he’s selling. However, he’s also living in the last new development in Liberty City, which resulted in most of the former residents of that community being unable to return after they took Section 8 Vouchers during its development. So, when he says he doesn’t want that to happen to Liberty Square, and then stands ideally by, and doesn’t leave his contract when the community gets offered Section 8 vouchers… I don’t know. Perhaps he thought he could help them more if he was on the inside than not, and watching a documentary you of course are looking at it with the benefit of both editing and hindsight. But he comes off as very naïve.
The thing is building improved housing, at its heart, is not bad. The older Liberty Square residents talked about how magical it was to live in those new houses in those early days. Even with the wall that surrounded their community at the time (to separate them from the white community). We also see that same joy when the kids run into their new homes in the New Liberty Square. However, the new Liberty Square not only was a poor build, but because of the use of Section 8 vouchers, it stripped them of much of their community in place of people paying high rent, and they also ended up inside a gate policed by management about their actions (kids can’t run around and be kids). They showed that there was space for them to move around to different houses as they razed houses to build, so why couldn’t they just renovate half the properties as they were and build some of these bigger mixed-used properties and make everything better?
I lived by a construction site for a year, and I’d wish that on no one, especially not these children I saw in the film, but we need to start making things better instead of faster because as multiple people in this film said along the lines of, these kids, these people deserve to have homes they can be proud to live in.
Razing Liberty Square premiered at Hot Docs.
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