Over the last decade, mobile home parks 鈥� or trailer parks, as they are commonly known 鈥� have become something of a rarity in South Florida. As the price of land has creeped up to unprecedented heights, investors have increasingly targeted these sites and the acres they sit upon as being ripe for development.
As 港澳天下彩has extensively reported those land purchases often immediately lead to longtime residents being evicted from their homes. The result is that one of the most affordable housing options available is disappearing. In their place, luxury developments far out of the reach of local salaries have gone up.
The harsh reality of the situation has forced many to question the very foundations of the region鈥檚 socioeconomic foundation, as decades-long residents are forced to leave the region.
Several residents 港澳天下彩spoke to who faced eviction from a Hialeah trailer park in 2018 said the experience made them consider returning to Communist Cuba, faulting the lack of tenant protections in the US for their plight. 鈥淲e live in a capitalist country,鈥� Carlos Hernandez, the then-mayor of that city, explained at the time. 鈥淭his is a trailer park where the owners of the land sold it to another company.鈥�
Photographer Diego Waisman has spent years documenting the plight of the trailer park in South Florida.
Mobile homes were once considered a regular and beloved part of the regional landscape, ranking alongside Art Deco architecture, he told WLRN. World War II veterans were encouraged to buy them; they were marketed to young families as an affordable housing option; seasonal visitors fleeing Canada鈥檚 harsh winters made them their second homes.
The erasure of the legacy has large ramifications for the region, said Waisman.
"I don't want to paint a picture of good against evil. I just want people to stop normalizing the fact that all these places are going away ... our memory is very fragile here in South Florida."Diego Waisman
In his forthcoming book 鈥� publishing Sept. 10 鈥� and his photo exhibition , Waisman forces the audience to turn its attention to these forgotten and often maligned sites, and the lives and histories they contain.
Waisman recently spoke with 港澳天下彩about his forthcoming book and photo exhibition. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
WLRN: When did you first notice that trailer parks were systematically being bought and redeveloped here in South Florida?
WAISMAN: I initially discovered that this community, which was very close to where I live in Aventura, was just sold to this development company. And I went there. I grabbed a very cheap camera 鈥� a video camera, actually 鈥� and went there because I thought it was kind of historic. I didn't talk to anybody. I was very shy. I didn't know what I was doing there. But I realized that it was important to document it, because if I didn't do it, nobody else will.
And the trend continued. After I went there and they evicted everybody and they destroyed everything, I discovered that there were other places 鈥� most of the time I discover this through news reporting from 港澳天下彩and the Miami Herald 鈥� that were going through the same type of circumstances. So I went there to try to understand what was going on, talk to the neighbors and document it in one way or another.
And where exactly are these neighborhoods?
It's a combination of many places. For the most part, it's Miami-Dade and Broward. The one that I was telling you about, the one in Aventura, is actually on the outskirts of the city of Aventura. They emptied out the space 鈥� this was in 2016. Today, the space is empty. They haven't done anything with it.
There was another one on Broward Boulevard that I documented extensively. They have constructed some condos there with an artificial lake that looks pretty, but everybody else is gone. There are other ones around the city, also in Hialeah, Sweetwater.
If you are careful enough to look, there are many communities all over the two counties.
One memorable photo in your book in particular shows a window with over a dozen old vehicle decals on it, issued by the state of Florida. And it appears to signify that this person has lived there in that mobile home for a long time. Can you talk a little bit about that?
The irony of this is that in the state of Florida, these type of mobile vehicles require a registration by the Florida Department of Transportation as a way of registering them in order to use the infrastructure that the department provides, yet they're anchored down. They're not using highways. They're not using avenues or streets.
They are affordable housing for thousands of people, and it was a way of saying, well: What's the role of the state here trying to accommodate these people in order to have a place to live?
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The decimation of the trailer parks is something that 港澳天下彩has paid a lot of attention to over the last decade or so, even before COVID-19 hit and the affordable housing crisis became the main topic of conversation. Can you talk a little bit about the trajectory of what's happened overall, and housing, as you've been shooting this?
Well, me and everybody else have noticed how the city is changing, right?
In these, what, 24 years where I have been living here in South Florida, I've seen this huge transformation from neighborhoods that were either working class or middle class or lower middle class, to the point that all these people are being pushed away, not just on the mobile home trailer parks, but across South Florida.
I don't want to paint a picture of good against evil. I don't believe it's that simple. I just want people to stop normalizing the fact that all these places are going away. For the most part, people don't recognize what was there before. You know, our memory is very fragile here in South Florida. I don't feel that we pay a lot of attention to history and especially the very quick urban transformations that we are looking at in the city, how fast and furious things are changing.
So, I decided to take upon myself to maybe slow it down with photography, to try to capture these images of the reality that has the very recent reality that we experience every day. To stop and to admire and to understand what's going on and to put it in a book that can be visited by the viewer, and [they can] experience the same type of experience or journey that I had.
"I think sometimes we lie to ourselves regarding what progress means and how it's affecting other people. Once the city changes so much that you don't recognize it anymore 鈥� who then is living there?"Diego Waisman
As you show, mobile homes were once celebrated as a realistic home ownership option for retirees and young families in particular 鈥� and they went to being considered almost a nuisance, something that's standing in the way of development and "progress." What makes that story so interesting to you?
I structured the work as a combination of many threads, because I thought it was very important for the viewer to really understand how this came about, to really contextualize everything. After World War II, all these G.I.s came back and there was a shortage of housing in general. And that's when the mobile homes became a thing.
And then they were in fashion and people could go anywhere. So it was kind of interesting to see how, in the 1950s, they were marketing all those trailers.
It allowed me to see now how they are advertising the apartments that replace those trailer parks 鈥� it's the exact same over the top images of eternal youth and happiness that you saw in the 50s, for these mobile homes.
What is it about mobile homes and the laws and protections surrounding them that make these housing issues so much different than other forms of housing?
Well, the most important part is that these people don't own the land. So they are renting the spaces.
They don't have a lot of protections with the law. Most of the people, most of these companies that buy these spaces in order to redevelop them, or just to evict them can do that without paying them anything.
There are not many protections that will give them any type of indemnity for them to go out and move to a different place.
And that's even if they've lived there for decades?
It doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. I met people that had been there for 20, 30 years that have seen the community change over this time.
Families that had to move their kids from school districts, that they didn't have any resources in order to go to a different place and they didn't have a lot of help from the corporations that are getting these spaces.
So, in some cases they get some kind of money. But most of the times they have to go miles away because of the cost of living here in South Florida.
Some people might say, 'well, you know, out with the old, in with the new, development is good.' Do you think something will be lost when the last trailer park here in South Florida gets bought out, residents pushed out and it gets developed in some other kind of way?
Yes, I do. The word 'progress' just bothers me so much.
I think sometimes we lie to ourselves regarding what progress means and how it's affecting other people. But going back to your question, I definitely will feel very sad if the last trailer is removed from the city. It was part of the iconic landscape, if you may, like Art Deco buildings. Mobile homes.
Once the city changes so much that you don't recognize it anymore, then it's not nostalgia. It's just that it's unrecognizable.
And who then is living there? And what do they do? And who are they? It's a lot of questions. I definitely don't have many answers. I'm just kind of an observer of all this, and I see how rapidly the whole situation is mutating to the point that it's unrecognizable, at least from the 20 plus years that I've been living here.
IF YOU GO
WHAT:
WHEN: Until August 30
WHERE: University of Miami Gallery, Wynwood Building, 2750 NW 3rd Ave, Suite 4, Miami, FL 33127
