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A small sigh escapes when you walk out of a Little Haiti restaurant on a hot afternoon with a cold can of Couronne sweating in your hand. The streets still hum with conversations and frying oil, but bulldozers, surrounded by construction tape, have taken away the city that was once home. Now new luxury buildings are set to rise beside the small restaurant that has served the neighborhood for generations.
This is a story South Florida is far too familiar with. From the painted warehouses of Wynwood to the historic streets of Overtown to the tight blocks of Liberty City, construction fences wrap around places that once defined the neighborhood. The skyline climbs higher, while long-time residents quietly wonder how long they will still fit into the picture.
For artist and performer, David Rohn, gentrification is inseparable from a widening economic gap. Rohn is a Miami-based visual and performance artist who has been showing work in the city since the 1990s. He often uses characters and staged scenes to talk about social roles, homelessness, and those who live at the edges of Miami’s rapid change. Rohn believes his purpose is to point out contradictions and empathetic aspects of his subjects, especially the harsh and uncomfortable sides of their social roles.
“It is not just gentrification. There has been a polarization of wealth so the middle class has shrunk, especially the lower middle class,” said Rohn.
Gentrification in Miami is not only a story about rising rent and new coffee shops, it’s also a story about water and land. As sea levels creep higher along the coast, higher ground in neighborhoods like Little Haiti, Liberty City, and parts of Overtown becomes more attractive to investors looking for cheaper and safer property. Streets that were once redlined or ignored are now rebranded as places with potential, even as the people who built those communities hold their breath every time another ‘For Sale’ sign appears.
“Lower middle class used to be able to buy a house and two cars, but now they definitely cannot get a house,” said Rohn. “I think along with that loss of economic status, I sense that they have lost social status too.”
According to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, more than 70 percent of Miami’s urban neighborhoods have experienced measurable gentrification since 2000, one of the highest rates in the United States. In neighborhoods on higher ground, that pressure is often described as climate gentrification, where the search for dry and affordable land collides with the lives of people who have lived there for generations.
“The way that Miami has changed is reflected in the way that the Miami art world has changed,” said Rohn.
Oscar Fuentes, a Miami writer and performer widely known as The Biscayne Poet, responds to changes in these neighborhoods through memory and feeling. Fuentes has spent years sharing his work in bars, galleries, and community spaces. He centers family, memory and everyday life in working-class Miami. He thinks of art as part of a larger conversation in the city.
“All of us as artists are doing some type of call and response with something that is bigger than us, something that we cannot see,” said Fuentes. “I think it is important to capture the ones breathing the same air as me and capture these moments because one day they were here, one day they were not.”
Photographer Zachary Balber is drawn to the way gentrification shows up in who owns property and in who controls the image. Balber is a Miami-based photographer whose work moves between fine art and commercial projects. He often uses images of homes, interiors and public spaces to question wealth, ownership and belonging in the city.
A photograph of a neighborhood can be used to sell it to outsiders, or it can challenge the idea that only some lives belong in the frame. He also sees a shift toward buildings that keep ownership out of reach.
“The difficulty of Miami is these new places that are being built, they are not for purchase, they are for renting,” said Balber. “What they are saying is, ‘We own this and you cannot own it anymore.’”
Balber thinks of photography as a middle-class medium that can highlight what powerful people would rather ignore. When he looks at the flood of images produced every day, he sees a kind of map of what a society values.
“As a lens-based artist, you have to be aware of who you are, your privileges, your preconceptions, so that you dance in these lines,” said Balber. “When you look at all of the images being made, it really tells us about who we are and what we are.”
According to a 2024 housing outlook from Miami Realtors, the weighted median single-family home price in Southeast Florida has increased by 80 percent since 2019. A typical household now needs roughly a $163,200 income to afford a single-family home. For many residents in Liberty City, Overtown, and Little Haiti, the ground beneath them becomes more expensive even as their paychecks stay nearly the same.
(Caplin News/ Johane Saintil)
For Carl Juste, a photographer and visual journalist, the stakes reach beyond any single neighborhood. Juste is a Haiti-born, Miami-raised photographer who has spent decades documenting Black and Caribbean communities in South Florida, thinking about how power, progress and memory collide in the neighborhoods he photographs.
Juste sees his own work as part of a responsibility to those communities. He says the only reason art works is because people can find themselves in it; otherwise, you are talking to yourself. His dream, like that of many immigrants, is to create a space of peace where people can learn, grow, make mistakes and be judged by their character, not by how they look, speak or pray.
“When I photograph any community, I am trying to photograph our values,” said Juste.
As a visual communicator, he believes he has to learn how to listen and respect the values of his subject. He hopes others feel a kind of déjà vu that brings them into their own present, not just someone else’s past.
“When future generations look at my art, I hope they can see themselves and I hope they see that life is not linear, it is circular,” said Juste.
In Miami’s changing neighborhoods, gentrification is measured in rising prices and new construction, but it is also measured in what people remember and who remains visible. Artists are holding on to the stories behind the statistics through poems, performances, photographs and films. Their work does not stop progress, and it does not pretend the cranes are not there. Instead, it insists that as the city reshapes itself, the people and histories that built it stay inside the frame.
