The streets of Miami’s ritziest neighborhoods flood — but Liberty City is bone dry.
The neighborhood sits just 12 feet above sea level. But that slightly higher ground is gold these days in South Florida, with rising seas caused by climate change.
That makes Liberty City irresistible to developers — and also to filmmakers who wanted to document what happens when gentrification comes for one of Miami’s historically Black neighborhoods.
The result is the new film, Razing Liberty Square by Academy Award-nominated director Katja Esson. Her movie traces the redevelopment of Liberty Square, which was one of the oldest segregated public housing projects in the country. She spent six years filming what had happened when the city turned over public housing to a private company.
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"Miami is very unique in that way," Esson said on WLRN's Sundial. "Climate gentrification in New Orleans is different, or in Hawaii, now with the wildfires — it happens after the disaster. Here it's happening before."
Real estate developers promised to build a $300 million, mixed-income housing development called "New Liberty Square" that wouldn’t displace any of the residents. However, the film shows a timelapse of broken promises and a cautionary tale.
"It was the promise that people could stay … that the community would not break apart, that people would just be moved into empty units that were available and then there would be a block-by-block demolition and construction, so nobody would have to leave."
In the film, hundreds of families were offered vouchers for Section 8 Housing and left. Only five families stayed.
However Related Urban Development Group, the firm behind Liberty Square, has contested the film's portrayal of the project.
In a letter shared with WLRN, below, the group’s president Albert Milo Jr said the completed development will have “more than enough units for all former residents who wish to return" and that the residents had requested the “flexibility” of Section 8 vouchers. "RUDG focused on all of what makes a community vibrant, safe and healthy," he added, in part.
From Hamburg to Liberty City
Esson, who was born and raised in Germany, moved to Miami in 1987 to study film and theater at the University of Miami. South Florida was a big departure from her cold port city of Hamburg, but she quickly fell in love with Miami's diverse tapestry of cultures. Of course, the sunny climate didn't hurt either.
She first visited Liberty City as part of a production crew filming a music video for 2 Live Crew, where she was one of the few women on set.
"A producer showed up at the film class and said, 'Hey, who wants to work on a music video? 'And I was like, 'Me, me, me!'" Esson said.
That experience gave her some street cred 20 years later as she began to establish trust with the Liberty Square community for her documentary — but she admits she had a lot to learn.
"I was so embarrassed that I had lived here for so many years in Miami and I did not know anything about the Black history of Miami," she said.
She felt as an outsider in the physical sense too: a red haired, fair skinned European woman, she stood out. But she embraces it.
As her filmography would suggest, she brings her European perspective to American subjects. She has produced films like Ferry Tales — a short documentary on the powder rooms of the Staten Island Ferry — or Skydancer a film about Mohawk iron workers in New York. And she brought that same curiosity and open-mindedness to Razing Liberty Square.
"It’s so easy to say, 'Oh yeah, Liberty City is a dangerous, violent neighborhood.' That’s what people kept repeating. But if you don’t understand why ... that would be a huge mistake not to explain how it got to this point," she said.
Esson began to piece together the events that led to the community's neglect. She spoke to community elders, delved into historic footage and captured intense public meetings.
"Every single neighborhood has changed and developed … only Liberty City seemed frozen in time to me," Esson said.
Initially, Esson said she wanted to approach this story from a historical perspective. It wasn't until she started speaking to the community did she embark on this journey, detailing every moment of hope and disappointment.
"I had to become very intentional in what I'm doing as a filmmaker in terms of collaboration and in terms of the power dynamics, and in terms of the question, who should tell whose story?"
The fate of Liberty Square raises questions about the value of public housing, whether housing should be considered a human right and what the government's role should be in managing it. The film examines the efficacy of mixed-income development as a housing solution.
But as one of the protagonists in her story said, it has to be done right — it cannot be at the expense of the community or its long-held institutions.
"Some say the film connects the dots, but the elders also are saying, 'Wow, there is now a document that shows how history has repeated [and] is repeated and repeated and repeated over and over again," Esson said.
The film runs at Coral Gables Cinema from Jan. 26 through Feb. 1. It will air nationally on PBS Jan.29. Listen above for the whole conversation on Sundial.
This article was updated on Jan. 26, 2024, to add a statement from Related Urban Development Group.
