Who Left Out The Dirty Laundry?

If I gave a party and wanted to keep my dirty laundry out of view
of my guest then I should make sure that my that my house is kept
in order. It seems to me that a city that is hosting an event such as
the Super Bowl should have especially addressed it's issues before
hand so that it's guest would not have to be exposed to the dirty
laundry. A simple solution to this would be for the NFL to adopt
a tougher screening policy for cities that bid for hosting of this
yearly event. Check out the article below.



There may be "One Game, One Dream," as Super Bowl XLI banners fluttering throughout the city proclaim. But advocates of the poor and homeless want the world to know there are two Miamis. As tens of thousands descend on this spruced-up city for the country's biggest sports party Sunday, the down and out are pointing beyond the sleek facade of high-rises, hip clubs and beachfront condos. In a weeklong protest to draw attention to the city's underside, homeless activists are putting a spotlight on the corruption and neglect they say permeates Miami and deprives the working class of a dignified existence.

Laurie Dowdell, 43, spends her days at "The Wall," a billboard on the site of the razed Scott-Carver public housing complex where she and 850 other families were evicted three years ago. They were promised new homes, but nothing has been built. The billboard lists the names of the displaced, including Dowdell, in an effort to shame the county into finding them a place to live."They said they were going to tear down this place and rebuild — give us a better place," said Dowdell, whose two daughters live with a cousin in Atlanta while she cleans houses and does odd jobs in Miami, where she can make more money.

A few blocks east, at another desolate corner of the crime-ridden Liberty City neighborhood, homeless people have erected a shantytown on a lot designated a decade ago for an affordable-housing project that never broke ground."The county is intentionally depleting the stock of low-income housing because that artificially props up rents in the private market," said Max Rameau, an opponent of gentrification who is leading the protest. Since Monday, residents of the shantytown, called Umoja, or "unity" in Swahili, have held guerrilla art parties, a Gentrification Teach-In and a Tour of Shame to showcase the sides of Miami that they say the Super Bowl promoters are trying to hide.

About 20 out-of-town reporters boarded a bus in fashionable South Beach on Wednesday for the Miami Workers Center "reality tour."They visited the shantytown, watched homeless people clash with police as they tried to put up a camp in Overtown, and met residents of the Blue Lakes Mobile Home Park, who say their electricity has been shut off by the property owner to drive them off the prime urban land. On Thursday, Rameau and other activists broke into an unoccupied public housing unit in Overtown, symbolically seizing it for a homeless man living at Umoja. Police arrived 30 minutes later and arrested the demonstrators.

A few hours later, the Glitz and Glam Granny Cheer Squad, homeless women from the Scott-Carver complex, rolled up on a flatbed truck to an NFL media event to wave pompoms and cheer for new public housing. They shouted encouragement to neighborhood youths on hand for a football clinic at a sports and education complex that the NFL built for Miami after the 1995 Super Bowl. More than one-third of Miami-Dade County's 835,000 households are supported by workers earning the minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, or less.The Miami-Dade Homeless Trust calculates that someone earning the minimum wage can afford $268 a month in rent. Because of a dearth of affordable or low-income housing, even dilapidated 1950s-era studio apartments in Liberty City are rented for $600 a month, according to census data compiled by the Miami Coalition for the Homeless.

"The prices are so high we can't afford to live here," said Mary Alice Wadley, gesturing toward crumbling two-story rentals still standing amid the razed public lots. Officials of the Super Bowl host committee say the protest is trying to deflate the city's party mood. They say it is inappropriate because the event is expected to generate $350 million in local spending, including NFL-mandated contracts with small minority-owned businesses.

They also note that Super Bowl visitors aren't responsible for Miami's social services problems."There's a lot of publicity that comes with hosting the Super Bowl, and obviously we want that to be as positive as possible," said Maria Scott, spokeswoman for the South Florida Super Bowl XLI Host Committee, a private group. "But there are always going to be people who want to share their opinion."Although the Super Bowl may benefit Miami's poor and middle class with its weekend crush of food sales, valet parking, taxi rides, hotel stays and limousine rentals, it is a legitimate opportunity to raise concerns about the city's housing crisis, said Ben Burton, executive director of the privately funded Miami Coalition for the Homeless.



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