Consolidating Liberty Square's Renaissance

Liberty Square III, called Harmony, was inaugurated on March 2, 2022.

Joshua Johnson, Liberty Square Student Scholarship Fund Recipient.

HUD Southeast Regional Administrator José Alvarez addresses the audience during the grand opening of Liberty Square III.

Each Liberty Square III apartment has its own washer and dryer. HUD Regional Administrator José Alvarez and Deputy Regional Administrator Tiffany Cobb tour the units.

On a recent Wednesday, Joshua Johnson excused himself from a college class in north Florida and went to a celebration in Miami. He returned home to share how proud he is to call himself a product of Liberty Square, and a first generation in his family going to college, on a full scholarship.

He was eager to see the opening celebration of Liberty Square phase 3, hosted by Miami-Dade Mayor Daniela Levin Cava and Public Housing and Community Development Director Michael Liu.

Joshua is studying to become a structural engineer. Liberty Square, the place where he grew up, where he saw his mom work three jobs to ensure he stayed on track, gave him the inspiration to give back. It also inspired his choice of study so he can transform places of despair into works of art, beauty, and landscape—similar to the Liberty Square his mom now enjoys.

HUD Southeast Regional Administrator José Alvarez and Deputy Regional Administrator Tiffany Cobb also joined the celebration of the brand new 192 affordable apartments (71 of them public housing replacement units) where each home has its own washer and dryer, and each apartment displays the attention to detail and design available to regular market rent apartments.

Alvarez declared himself thrilled to join the residents for the opening of phase 3 and the new prospects it represents for the families of Liberty Square. He said that "the transformation and revitalization of this area is remarkable, and a reminder that HUD programs and funding are more than an investment in affordable housing or community development, it's an investment in people."

Alvarez and Cobb also witnessed the joyful testimony of determined Section 3 contractors who have worked on the renaissance of Liberty Square, a neighborhood that is now counting 600 apartments built in the last few years. Tenants who graduated from property management classes are now working on improving the living conditions of other developments.

In the new Liberty Square, neighbors have become building contractors and entrepreneurs with growing businesses not just self-sufficient but also successful employers, providing a glimpse of the reach and outcomes of HUD programs when they are used the way they are intended to be.

Currently, Liberty Square is at almost halfway towards the goal of 1400 apartments. It is hard to stand in any of the existing three phases and remember this as the same area of the battered 1930's apartments, abandoned to its own devices. The same place where just a decade ago, families didn't trust the announcements of change and improvement after decades of neglect and broken promises.

For ages, no one wanted to touch the area because --it seems-- no one knew how to make the community whole. This one, the first housing development in the South for African Americans, built in 1937, was waiting for its revitalization for decades.

Perhaps the place also needed a dreamer, and it came in the form a developer. Albert Milo, the CEO of Urban Related, had the marching orders from Jorge Perez, the chairman of a luxury building company who decided to also develop affordable housing to reminisce where he started. "This is the one you have to do," Milo says of their endeavor in Liberty City.

"Anyone can build housing, we had to build a community," says Milo. Their next step is the opening of an elementary charter school in the middle of Liberty Square.

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