By Valerie Milano
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/29/24 – Abraham Lincoln taught us that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
But for the people who live in Miami’s Liberty Square, part of the Liberty City neighborhood, you cannot fool any of them ever again. Never again will those folks ever accept the word of government officials on matter of neighborhood redevelopment.
And with good reason. Promises have been broken over and over again, and those folks have seen it all before. It has been a history of broken promises and outright lies that has made the people of the Liberty Square neighborhood unwilling to believe that the redevelopment that began in 2015 is anything but a land grab on behalf of the privileged white developers, whose beachfront property is about to drown under rising sea levels.
Tonight, on PBS, “Razing Liberty Square” makes its national premiere, and this thought-provoking documentary shines a harsh light on the bamboozle that is being perpetrated on the residents of the oldest segregated public housing project in the South.
Academy Award-winning producer/director Katja Esson started documenting the Libert Square Project in 2017, and the result is this stunning indictment of the shameful way Miami Dade County’s public officials have manipulated the residents of the 55-acre neighborhood. Billed as development but has turned out to be displacement, pure and simple.
“It’s a little bit of a word game of what displacement means to different people,” Esson said during a recent exclusive interview with “The Hollywood Times” about her award-winning film. “Here, the choice was given, and it led to a mass exodus. So, many people call it displacement because the facts are that the community did break apart and many, many members moved away.”
Click below for our exclusive interview:
Indeed, after the residents of Liberty Square were given assurances that they would be welcomed back once the project was finished, the return to normalcy has been nearly non-existent.
As redevelopment lagged, those residents were offered Section 8 vouchers, and most accepted them as a way to stave off homelessness and mandatory displacement as the project’s pace slowed to a crawl.
And now, nearly nine years after the project began, only five residents have returned to the nine square blocks they called home for the totality of their lives.
“Razing Liberty Square” weaves personal stories in and out of the larger social justice narrative of Climate Gentrification. Foremost it is about a community fighting to save itself from being erased in a rapidly changing Miami. Underserved for decades and suffering from chronic disinvestment, Liberty City has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation.
But as rising seas threaten Miami’s luxurious beachfront, wealthy property owners are pushing inland to higher ground. Liberty City, which sits on a ridge, is now real estate gold. Initially, there was hope in the community that this development would be different from past urban renewal projects, but residents cannot forget Miami’s long history of broken promises.
Esson’s film shows how the Liberty Square neighborhood has tried to roll with the punches as building delays and project changes have left them, once again, holding the bag.
Liberty City was the scene of two of this nation’s largest riots, in 1969 and again in 1980, the latter after an all-white jury acquitted six white Miami police officers of the beating death of black insurance salesman Arthur Duffie.
Duffie, a former Marine, a man with no prior police record, and father of two, was stopped by police for speeding, handcuffed and beaten to death by the officers. The rage the acquittal sparked nearly burned Miami to the ground. And the memory of that betrayal by the system, along with a litany of lies and broken promises, lingers.
The redevelopment plan ultimately has taken a neighborhood with cultural and historical meaning and turned it into just another blended community with a homogenous identity. It should be no surprise to anyone that the residents have not trusted the city to keep its word.
Now, following a year of national and worldwide screenings, the film returned to Miami of its hometown premiere, with predictable results.
“That, for me, was the most important screening this film would ever have, with all of the community there and all the elders,” Esson said, who noted that the elders all voiced the opinion that the project is just a repeat of the same old same old.
“This film connects the dots and shows how history keeps repeating itself,” Esson said. “That is why has the people from the community are so excited about this film. It just shows the repetition of history very, very clearly.”
“Razing Liberty Square,” premiered at Hot Docs 2023 and has been winning audiences and juries at a number of film festivals across the US and in Europe, among them the Changemaker Award at the Woodstock Film Festival. It is produced by Ann Bennett and Corinna Sager
The film screens tonight at 8/7 Central on PBS.
