A shuttered Tex-Mex, Spanish and American food store and rows of run-down trailers sit across the street from a construction site in Immokalee. This site at the corner of Lake Trafford Road and North 19th Street is the future home of the Immokalee Affordable Housing Project, started by the Immokalee Fair Housing Alliance.
The group has a vision for this site: to provide affordable and livable housing for hundreds of low-income people in the Immokalee area.
The alliance began after Hurricane Irma in 2017 when several disaster relief organizations, faith-based organizations, non-profits and caring people came together to provide assistance for locals.
Right after Irma, these organizations brought in the necessities: food, water, diapers. But then the groups faced a existing issue that only became worse after the hurricane's damage: housing.
“Safe and affordable housing has always been a shortage in Immokalee,” Dr. Arol Buntzman, the CEO of the Immokalee Fair Housing Alliance, said. “But the hurricane destroyed many trailers, shacks, and homes, to a point where many families lost their housing.”
Buntzman said the hurricane forced some farmworkers and other low-income families in the community to rent moldy, infested trailers or shacks that were almost 50 years old. Despite the poor condition of the housing units, people had to pay rent that was 60% to 70% of their monthly income.
The strain of high rent payments is a reality for residents like Glendale Coleman.
“More like 70% of my income goes to our rent,” 57-year-old Coleman said. “It's ridiculous. Some people around here are paying $300 a week for a two-bedroom trailer.”
An estimated 800 to 1000 families in Immokalee, who've been in the community for years, are living in shacks or decades-old trailers that are infested with cockroaches, among other problems, according to Buntzman.
“Our objective was to provide safe affordable housing because it became very clear that the missing link to help low-income families that live and work in Immokalee year-round to help them escape from poverty is having safe, affordable housing that doesn't consume more than 30% of their household income,” Buntzman said.
He added that the goal for the Lake Trafford location is for very low-income people to be able to rent two-bedroom apartments for about $600 a month, and three-bedroom units around $750 a month.
Immokalee resident Mida Galindo is skeptical about the housing.
“It isn’t affordable,” Galindo said. “Not everybody has one or two kids. I have six and luckily, I have a four-bedroom, but for other people it's not like that. It's hard everywhere.”
Galindo has lived in Immokalee her whole life and is proud of her community. But she does say it’s a struggle to make ends meet.
“The rent here in Immokalee is going way out of hand,” Galindo said. “There's going to be people that are homeless, or there's probably already people that are homeless because of it.”
Other residents of the community, like farmworker Gerardo Reyes-Chavez, see the project as a starting point for overdue changes.
“It's something that came out in response to the need for affordable housing and decent and safe housing in Immokalee, due to circumstances that have placed our community at risks because of the poor conditions that we have lived in for decades,” Reyes-Chavez said.
He has picked oranges and tomatoes, and harvested watermelons, beans, corn and peppers. He said the lack of safe and affordable housing has made life difficult for a lot of people.
“We're a community that is basically putting food on the table for everyone in this country,” Reyes-Chavez said. “And as such we should be receiving different things that are fair, and affordable housing; decent and dignified spaces for us and for our families.”
The housing alliance project is expected to be eight multi-family buildings with 16 units each, totaling 128. In each building half of the units will be two-bedrooms, while the other half will be three-bedrooms. A community center is planned to house a computer room, classroom, and a meeting area so that affiliated organizations can provide early childhood education.
“I’m glad that they’re building better houses,” Glendale Coleman said. “Compared to some of these rat holes that people are living in around here.”
Coleman said he would like to see more regulation of rent prices in his community. Reyes-Chavez agrees with Coleman on this issue.
“There's also a lot of abuse in terms of how expensive rent can be in be in Immokalee,” Reyes-Chavez said. “It’s just ridiculous, but there's no oversight, there's no limiting.”
Reyes-Chavez began farm work at age 11 and has been a staff member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for over two decades.
He and some others in Immokalee believe their community should be getting more representation and help from leaders in Collier County.
“This is not a brown, a dark, a light skin county; this is a white man county,” Coleman said. “I'm just speaking to how I’ve seen it from living here all my life.”
“They're white and rich and they can live however they want to live,” Galindo said of many Collier and southwest Florida residents. “But yet, our people... we can't do that, but we're happy with the little bit that we have.”
Just over 70% of the people in Immokalee are of Hispanic descent, with 21% being of Black or African American descent. The poverty rate in Immokalee is 37%, while the state of Florida has a poverty rate of 12%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Adan Hernandez, owner of Iris Variety Stores not far from the alliance housing site, acknowledges that the community he has lived in since 1956 is consistently overlooked.
“Immokalee has always been out of the connection of Naples and the big cities,” Hernandez said. “The necessity of housing has been in existence all the time because we’re still getting more people every day or every year; it's an accumulation of more people with lower income.”
Some residents believe the housing project will be helpful. Glendale Coleman said it may put an end to families paying $300 a week - about $1200 a month - for rent.
“If you see $700 a month rent, that's going to be a big change and it’s a house," Coleman said. "People are going to see that as good. That's a blessing.”
The project is funded by donations and grants from disaster assistance, churches, and other non-profit and faith-based groups, with no government money involved.
“In order to be able to have rents not exceed 30% of household income for people making 60% of the average median income or less, you can't have mortgages, you can't have real estate taxes, you can't have a profit motive,” Buntzman of the housing alliance said. “So, by eliminating that, it's how we're able to develop the project and have the rents, even though they're low, cover all the operating costs, and reserves for maintenance and replacement.”
Since the project is funded by donations and grants, the plan is to build as the money comes in.
All the infrastructure for the entire project such as the sewers, water lines, fire sprinkler lines, freshwater storm drainage, and the roads are under construction now, and will be finished sometime in March. The alliance hopes for project completion in three years, according to Buntzman.
“The Immokalee Fair Housing Alliance is trying to present something that is going to be benefiting the community and we are looking forward to be able to continue these types of conversations,” farmworker Gerardo Reyes-Chavez said. “This is one organization, but the need is bigger than what this is going to represent.”
But he said he sees affordable housing as a starting point.
“There's many things that could be done to improve the lives of workers and they shouldn't be done as an act of charity, like an act of feeling sorry for those who are really the poorest in the county,” Reyes-Chavez said. “It should be a recognition of something we have already done. We feed everyone.”