Miami's poverty a grim backdrop to Super Bowl glitz

from The Orlando Sentinel

MIAMI -- The bomb-sniffing dogs are training. Fleets of limos are on the way. The ink is dry on anti-gouging pledges. Thousands of volunteers are on the march. Concierges are hustling to fill every VIP whim.

And Miami's newest homeless camp, a plywood and pallet shantytown, is gussying up to take center stage, if only for a moment.

With South Florida gearing up to host its record-tying ninth Super Bowl next Sunday, community titans have the drill, the details and the mission down pat. Their primary aim is to show off South Florida's best side, then revel in the estimated $350 million tourism bonanza.

As hundreds of posters and banners hanging on windows and from streetlights in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties say, "One game. One dream. One chance to shine."

But the world's most-watched sporting event is also offering an opportunity to shine a laser beam on the other Miami: the third-poorest city in the nation, where living wages and affordable housing are out of the reach of many of the residents helping to foot the Super Bowl tab.

Against a backdrop of lavish parties -- some with admission rivaling the $3,000-plus going rate for tickets to the Indianapolis Colts/Chicago Bears game -- advocates for the homeless and poor are staging a "Reality Tour." On Wednesday, a bus will take a few of the thousands of journalists converging on South Florida on a short drive to communities a world away from trendy Miami Beach, where the reporters will work, stay and presumably play.

"There is one game and one dream, but different realities," said Joseph Phelan, an activist with the Miami Workers Center. "Miami is the playground of the rich and famous, but it is not paradise for the poor . . . and the only thing the city and county are doing about it is filling their pockets with tourism dollars from the Super Bowl."

New foe: Gentrification

Among the stops will be Umoja Village, a shantytown established last fall by squatters who claimed the city-owned land under a 1998 court settlement reached after Super Bowls past, when the city cleared out its homeless by confiscating and burning their belongings.

That practice is now illegal, but the squatters hope to highlight what they contend is the newest way of displacing the poor: gentrification. In many depressed neighborhoods, low-income and public-housing apartments have been razed to make way for pricey new condos, or for "affordable housing" that, despite millions spent, was never built.

Ironically, the most visible example sits across from one of the most tangible payoffs from the 1995 Super Bowl, the National Football League Youth Education Town Center in Liberty City. Started with a $1 million donation from the NFL, the YET Center is an oasis for children who live in one of Miami-Dade's toughest neighborhoods.

Inside the brightly painted walls, elementary kids are learning to build robots on brand-new Dell computers. Tutors help with homework and coaches teach an array of sports, from basketball and football to dance and fencing. All for free.

"It's fun," said David Spivey, 6. "You get to play games. You get to build stuff."

But more than six years ago, the county began bulldozing 850 public-housing units near the center, promising to replace them with half as many affordable homes. Today, $22 million later, only 10 houses are complete, and the number of kids the center serves has plummeted -- from about 800 a day to about 300.

Habitat for Humanity has since taken over the project, and the housing agency is under investigation for fraud and mismanagement.

"Substance is a lot more important than image, and it bothers me that the county is more interested in maintaining the illusion of glitz and glamour than it is in dealing with the reality of poverty and corruption," said Max Rameau, a community activist who organized the squatters village.

Local economy's boost

But for South Florida, the Super Bowl is all about image. In the view of community leaders, the region's economic future rests on the Super Bowl's success. Not on the game at Dolphin Stadium, but on the impression that sunny South Florida leaves on the estimated 120,000 visitors, including 3,500 credentialed media, and 1 billion worldwide TV viewers expected to watch the game.

Though some analysts question the figure, officials with the South Florida Super Bowl XLI Host Committee estimate that visitors and the NFL will pump more than $350 million into the regional economy. That's 35 times more than the $10 million the committee raised -- a total of $2 million from Miami-Dade and Broward counties and the rest from corporate sponsors -- to house the teams; throw parties for the media; hire a concierge service to line up yacht slips and tee times for corporate high-rollers; extract anti-gouging pledges from hoteliers; recruit 8,000 hospitality volunteers; and infect residents with Super Bowl fever.

"There's a huge multiplying effect," said Rodney Barreto, the host committee's chairman. "If visitors have a good time, they come back. They buy real estate. They move their companies here."

If the Reality Tour is the worst publicity that South Florida has to contend with this week, Barreto will be happy. A member of three previous host committees, he knows too well that calamity can knock at inopportune times.

In 1989, just six days before kickoff, the Super Bowl was upstaged by the fatal shooting of a black motorcyclist by a white policeman in Miami's poorest black neighborhood. Instead of Miami's new skyline and tropical sophistication, newspapers and broadcasts around the world were dominated by combat-ready cops, rampaging youth, burning cars -- and stories about the two Miamis.

But, Barreto notes, a good deal has changed since then, most notably a concerted effort to ensure the NFL and host committee's largesse reaches every segment of the community. To date, he said, minority and female-owned businesses in South Florida have been awarded $14 million in NFL contracts for catering, barricades and other services needed to throw the grandest party around.

That sum eclipses the $10 million record set in Detroit last year and is one reason Darryl Holsendolph, a Miami native who grew up blocks from the shantytown, would prefer activists chose a different time to air the county's dirty laundry.

As the holder of the contract to sell NFL souvenirs at Miami International Airport, Holsendolph, 43, says he is proof of a Super Bowl's trickle-down effect. For his first Super Bowl in 1995, his company, Holsen Inc. Merchandising, hired about 25 people. For the 1999 game, his staff grew. And for next week's game, he has about 100 people on the payroll -- 60 percent of them from his old Liberty City neighborhood.

"What happened with housing is a shame, but it has nothing to do with Super Bowl," he said. "I suggest now is the time to start looking for opportunities in 2010."

And that, of course, is when South Florida is set to host the Super Bowl for a record-breaking 10th time.