With $40M grant, Miami-Dade neighborhood getting new homes, free Bezos nursery school

A $40 million federal housing grant will subsidize a new apartment complex in the Goulds neighborhood, as well as provide cash to fund a string of services for residents, including transit shuttles and a free pre-K school run by a Jeff Bezos charity.

The award by the Housing and Urban Development Department gives a major boost to the planned redevelopment of Cutler Manor Apartments, a 1971 housing complex with 218 apartments reserved for low-income residents. With a mix of state, county and now federal funds, the plan is to transformed the complex into a modern 445-unit residential campus with a broader mix of income levels.

Owned by the non-profit developer Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH), the project at the corner of Southwest 216th Street and 109th Avenue is linked to a residential complex already under construction nearby called Meridian Point at Goulds Station. That POAH project is key to the development plan because some Cutler Manor residents will temporarily move to into new units there to allow the phased demolition of their current apartment complex, which relies on the federal Section 8 program for operational dollars.

“Across the street, you see the first part of this work,” Rodger Brown, managing director of real estate for POAH, said at the grant-presentation event Wednesday staged to have the Meridian construction site in the background. “We’re just getting started.”

Local and federal officials pitched the funding as a way to invest not just in new housing, but also in services and amenities that can help boost the fortunes of residents.

That includes $1.5 million to create a Bezos Academy inside the new Cutler Manor complex, a free pre-K school open all year with room for 80 students, part of a national chain run by the non-profit educational organization backed by the Amazon founder, who grew up in Miami.

The HUD Choice Neighborhoods grant also provides $2 million to assist people in purchasing 20 below-market townhomes in the new Cutler Manor complex, which is expected to start construction in 2025.

The application for the $40 million grant being managed by Miami-Dade’s Public Housing and Community Development Department describes the existing Cutler Manor as “concentrated by race and poverty and marked by poor design,” where the mostly Black residents faced years of crime and drug dealing.

Social services, transportation help and more

Along with the Bezos school, the grant would fund social services for residents and a new Freebee transit shuttle for quick rides to the county’s South Dade busway, soon to be upgraded with rapid-transit express routes. By retaining existing public-housing units while adding units closer to market rates, the new Cutler Manor would attract a mix of incomes and dilute the concentration of poverty that exists there now.

“This is truly equity in action,” Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at at the event.

Michele Perez, an assistant deputy secretary in HUD, said the funding is part of an effort to reverse past housing decisions based on segregation that often left low-income Black residents living in neighborhoods isolated from good-paying jobs and economic activity.

“So what do we do today? If we want to operationalize racial justice and equity,” Perez said, “we must be bold, we must be courageous.”

Lisa Lewis Capers, a Cutler Manor resident for 25 years, said she’s been less anxious about crime outside her $650-a-month apartment after a security upgrade that includes parking gates and a strict policy only residents with stickers being allowed to drive onto the campus.

A full-time professional caregiver, Capers said she’s on the list to move into the Meridian tower, which was purchased with county funds and is under construction now. As a former Cutler Manor resident, she’d have an apartment waiting for her once the first phase of the project is completed.

“Over the years, I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly,” she said during her remarks at the check-presentation event. I’m going to be honest. A lot of people thought this day would never come. But thank God it is here.”

This story was originally published August 3, 2023 at 4:14 PM.