Farm workers in desperate need to get housing options
Affordable housing project in often-overlooked community aims to provide relief for farmworkers toiling in poverty and living in deplorable conditions.
Sitting on the corner of Lake Trafford Road and 19th Street in Immokalee, the construction site sticks out. It’s a big development. The property has been cleared, crews are working and, in just a few weeks, eight two-story buildings making up 128 hurricane resistant, two- and three-bedroom apartments will slowly begin to appear.
For those who live in bigger cities, this, seeing a large patch of land cleared out and crews roll in, is part of everyday existence, as common a site as a Starbucks or McDonald’s or Circle K on a street corner.
But here, in Immokalee, one gets the sense a project this big is something different, something out of the ordinary. To the observer shooting down Lake Trafford, it’s the size — 9.5 acres — that makes it stick out.
But what’s really different about this project, what makes it stand out to those in the know, those who live in this rural, hardscrabble town just north of the Everglades in east Collier County, is what the project means to the community, who it is being built for and what it represents.
The apartment development is an affordable housing project for low-income families in Immokalee. When complete, the development will include a community center with a computer lab and classrooms for early-childhood and afterschool programs. There will be athletic facilities and health counseling.
The idea behind the project is to create a home for families as well as opportunities for them to gain workforce skills and provide some stability to a community of largely of farmworkers.
“Safe, affordable, decent housing, hurricane resistant housing is the missing link to help low-income Immokalee families escape from exploitation and poverty,” says Arol Buntzman, chairman of the Immokalee Fair Housing Alliance.
While cities up and down both coasts of Florida and nationwide struggle to find ways to provide affordable and workforce housing for its citizens, the Alliance, a nonprofit organization, is behind the development. It came up with the idea, bought the property and is raising the money and working with volunteers to get it built.
The goal: provide the families of farmworkers toiling in the nearby fields with safe, affordable housing options. Something many of them living in Immokalee just don’t have — and haven't for generations.
“When housing costs are more than 50% to 60% of household income,” Buntzman says, “there’s a problem.”
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