Hialeah’s History of Fighting Rent Hikes
By Nadege Green
Miami-Dade has a long history of tenant organizing that isn’t talked about widely. Miami-Dade tenants have long resisting rent hikes and substandard living conditions.
Recently, tenants from Hialeah rightfully raised their collective voices to protest rent increases that amount to 65 percent more than what they are currently paying after EcoLanding Development and Eco Stone Group Investments, Miami real estate investment firms purchased their 20-unit apartment building.
Working with the Miami Workers Center, Hialeah residents formed a tenant union to negotiate with the landlords who so far have refused to sit down with them. In response to tenants organizing, the landlord instead resorted to retaliatory evictions against some of the organizers.
This fight is not new for Hialeah renters in Miami-Dade.
In 1981, led by Franciso Soler, Hialeah renters formed a tenant union and fought back against extreme hikes by European Investments, a corporation that owned several apartment buildings in the neighborhood, and other landlords, many of which were foreign based.
Then, observers and tenant rights activists, pointed to an influx of Cubans coming to Miami via the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and landlords who saw an opportunity to cash in on newly arrived Cubans for the hikes. Miami saw up to 65,000 new arrivals in need of housing at a time when the region was already facing a housing shortage.
In the Miami Herald, Soler described his Hialeah rent going from $350 a month to $470. He said following the Mariel boatlift, rents in Hialeah increased up to four times what people were paying before.
“The ‘over-population’ of Dade County by Cuban and Haitian refugees gave landlords a perfect opportunity to hike rents,” he said in a 1981 interview.
One landlord in an interview with the Miami Herald confirmed that increases were not related to actual expenses for the buildings, but simply were about making more money from their investment in light of the housing shortage. In other words, they knew they could get people to pay what they were asking even if it meant displacing families who could not afford it.
In response, tenants in Hialeah took to the streets banging on pots, holding protest signs and demanding a change to the financial abuse of Cuban immigrants.
One of the oldest rent strikers was 94 year-old Maria Margirit whose Hialeah rent went from $165 to $300 a month, exceeding her entire social security check by $62.
The Hialeah Tenant Association would lead Hialeah renters in several successful rent-strikes that yielded concessions from landlords. In the case of one building at 1105 W Okeechobee Road, the union, after threats of withholding rent, were able to get their landlord to abandon a $100 rent hike.
In two other cases in 1981, the Hialeah Tenant Association took their case to court. They were able to get Hialeah landlords to cut proposed hikes by half and agree not to tack on any additional increases for almost a year.
Just as in 1981, the renters in Hialeah today want to live in housing they can afford without abusive rent hikes in the middle of a pandemic that has impacted the livelihood and incomes of many renters.
The demands today are practically identical to those from forty years ago:
- A transition period with no rent increase
- A cap on increases when they do happen
- Year-long leases to stop surprise hikes that blindside families on short-term or month-to-month arrangements
Francisco Soler, the Hialeah tenant organizer from1981, envisioned a Miami-Dade with many tenant unions spread across the county that would share tactics and form a collective to lobby for renter-friendly policies. The tenants in Hialeah and organizers at Miami Workers Center are building on that legacy today.
Update: Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo Jr. offers rental assistance to tenants facing rent increase
