Letter From Miami: There's Trouble--Lots Of It--in Paradise

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It probably doesn't help the morale of working-class residents that Miami has a way of shaking its wealthy side in your face. On many mornings, rush-hour drivers on packed causeway bridges between Miami and Miami Beach have to idle their engines a bit longer as the drawbridges raise for yachters on their breakfast cruises from nearby celebrity islets.

The competition to stay afloat hasn't improved ethnic tensions, either. For all the vibrant, cross-hemispheric diversity in Miami, its Latino, black and white enclaves remain segregated and mistrustful of one another. The Cuban exiles' dominion over much of Miami politics (remember the Elián González uprising?) has bred resentment in some quarters. This showed in the outcry earlier this year when the Miami-Dade school board, whose system has a dismal 45% graduation rate, announced that it would spend tens of thousands of dollars in court to ban a kindergarten book about Cuba that it says isn't tough enough on Fidel Castro.

Even though the city of Miami has the third worst poverty rate in the nation, there have been few credible attempts to help the lowest earners find housing. One problem is weak government oversight of development--a sign, some complain, that Miami's sun-soaked complacency has addled its political leaders as well. "Planning is disdained as the enemy here," says Gihan Perera, director of the Miami Workers Center. Local anger boiled over recently at a housing scandal that Perera's group helped the Miami Herald expose: Miami-Dade's government housing agency paid millions of dollars to politically connected developers for low-income projects that were never built or were used to construct private condominiums instead. "This is a greedy city," says Yvonne Stratford, 52, an unemployed seafood-warehouse worker who had hoped to live in one of the new low-income units.

Imagine Miami, a private community-development project, recently asked some 1,600 randomly selected residents to list what they thought were the top "Miami values." What was the No. 1 value? Corruption. "[Miamians] don't trust their leaders or each other," says the group's founder Daniella Levine.

When it comes to that problem, and to many others, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez says he knows where to start. "The structure of government here often doesn't work," he told TIME. "[Miami] gets ruled in the end by an unwieldy, unaccountable bureaucracy." Alvarez argues that the citizens of Miami are ready to help take their city back. He points to a recent $3 billion bond issue that voters approved for massive infrastructure improvements, a half-penny tax to build up their virtually nonexistent public-transit system, and a new $400 million downtown performing-arts center. And a majority of Miamians support Alvarez's efforts to reduce the inordinate powers of their county commission--which include housing-agency oversight--especially since its members have long run Miami-Dade like a collection of venal fiefdoms. A judge has ordered the commission to schedule a referendum on the issue. But in the meantime, Miamians are likely to see more of their neighbors winging north.

To view a photo essay on the state of Miami today, go to time.com/miami