Photo Essays

Forget Foreclosure: County Codes Cost Florida Families Their Families

By Susannah Nesmith | Special to Equal Voice News

Photography by Mike Kane

Miami, FLORIDA – The hundred or so families who live at Royal Duke Trailer Park in the Brownsville area of Miami share a tight bond.  Some are extended families living in groups of trailers; many are immigrants — from Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Most work hard at low-wage jobs, some are unemployed, others retired. They all struggle financially.

Royal Duke residents paid anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 to purchase their mobile homes, and pay the trailer park owner $500 a month to rent the space where their trailers sit. Now some residents are in a precarious position: Come up with the money to make structural changes required by county code, or lose their original investment and their homes.

Miami-Dade County building inspectors have recently stepped up enforcement at trailer parks, issuing citations and threatening to fine park owners if housing-code violations aren’t remedied. In turn, park owners are evicting residents who can’t comply, the trailer titles reverting to the park owners.

Miriam Ross, a public information officer with Miami-Dade County Permitting, Environment and Regulatory Affairs Department, noted, “If you buy a property with a violation, you are the owner of the violation. You have to do due diligence before you buy.”

Kit Rafferty, executive director of South Florida Jobs With Justice, sees the residents’ side: “These families have a different understanding of civic engagement and of building codes ‒ many people come from places where there are none.”

In fact, Florida does not require dwelling inspections during a sale, and most Royal Duke residents do not have the money to hire a home inspector or know how to find out if a mobile home meets Miami-Dade County housing code.

Some Royal Duke residents have already walked away, losing their homes. Some have filed appeals, hoping to gain time to fix up their homes. Other residents are taking a stand, forming an association to take action against the park owner.

“It is an issue of poverty, but also an issue of people not understanding that they can stand up to power without being shot.”

Rural America: Under Siege

Photography and Story by Jared Soares | Equal Voice Newspaper

ARKANSAS – When the U. S. Postal Service announced it was considering closing 3,653 post offices, the news tore at the heart of rural communities throughout the country. Having already lost schools, banks and stores, many rural residents fear losing their post office will be the end of their small towns.

Arkansas, the second poorest state in the country, could be the hardest hit. It has 179 post offices on the potential closure list – 35 percent of the post offices in the state.

Rural towns in Arkansas grew up around farming and timber. Families have lived in their communities for generations, the younger generations often building their homes on the same land where their grandparents lived. For them, the post office is concrete evidence that their community exists.

In rural areas – where cell phone connections are unreliable and Internet service painfully slow –the post office is a community’s connection to the outside world, and residents are fighting with all they have to keep that connection.

Although they might just be a building and a ZIP Code to decision-makers in far-away cities, to rural communities, their post offices are a matter of their very identity, and evidence that their community counts.

Shuttered Factories Leave Martinsville Families Struggling

Photography and Story by Jared Soares | Equal Voice Newspaper

VIRGINIA – For 75 years the textile and furniture industries in Martinsville and Henry County in southern Virginia employed thousands of people who produced American-made clothes, linens and furniture with familiar names like Bassett and Fieldcrest.

Now the city of 13,821 battles an unemployment rate close to 20 percent, nearly double both the state and national averages. In a final blow, StarTek, an outsourcing call center that employed about 700 people has closed.

Job prospects are slim. A quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Many of the workers who spent decades in the factories have lost their main source of income along with their identities and their dreams. Martinsville is a shell of what it used to be.

Children in the community, now dominated by a NASCAR Speedway, have no memory of the town when it was thriving and industrious. Factory work has been sent overseas, the result of lenient national import policies and the North American Free Trade Agreement. It is easier for foreign companies that pay their employees a miniscule wage compared to their American counterparts to compete for a share of the U.S. market.

In October 2010, photojournalist Jared Soares began documenting the lives of families in Martinsville. He listened to their stories of better days and of their hopes for the future and for their children. His photographs put a face on the unemployed and the poor that are often shown only as statistics.

In coming months, Soares will continue weaving stories and photographs to create a portrait of the 44 million people living in poverty in America. Perhaps the stark images and the undeniable truth of their situation will raise awareness among legislators and policymakers of the reality and the urgency facing families.

2011 © Equal Voice Newspaper