Allapattah, a working class, majority Latino neighborhood in Miami, is bounded by convenience—a hospital, metro stations, an art museum, highways for easy access to downtown, the beach and other points of interest—which makes it a magnet for development, pushing prices up, and residents and businesses out. Perhaps Allapattah’s most convenient feature is its relatively high elevation in a flat, low-lying, increasingly flood-prone city, making it a prime target for the climate gentrification driving development there and in other Miami neighborhoods like it.
“It’s understandable that people are going to want to move inland, but do we need to take out the locals to do that?” asks Mileyka Burgos-Flores, executive director of the Allapattah Collaborative CDC. She describes the community as the heart of little Santo Domingo, referencing the neighborhood’s Dominican influences. But in recent years, new developments have been growing in the neighborhood, with rental prices out of sync in an area where median income is below $30,000.