Miami Little Haiti Landlord-Developer Evicting Tenants From Complex It Wants Redeveloped

Laid-off restaurant server Juan Pablo Alberto Murillo-Gonzalez has run out of options but to wait for the day police tack an eviction notice to his Miami Design Place apartment door.

He would collect his belongings and what’s left from $300 he borrowed from a friend and try to find a place, although that likely would be his car, Murillo-Gonzalez said.

The 42-year-old lost his job as a downtown restaurant server at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March when eateries closed to stop the virus spread. Now he is one of 29 Design Place households owner SPV Realty LC has sued to evict, filing as the pandemic rages.

SPV Realty in the filing says Murillo-Gonzalez and his roommate owe $4,350 in rent since Aug. 1 for their $1,550-a-month unit. The case filed in August closed in November after a writ of possession was issued following a default final judgment of possession against the tenants.

“Do I have hard feelings for this company? I know it’s a business. But at this point, I don’t think it’s right what they are doing, especially in the pandemic. It’s not human, you know,” Murillo-Gonzalez said. “It’s a lot of people dying out there. A lot of people that’s hungry. It’s a big corporation and that’s what the big corporations do. They eat out of the poor.”

SPV Realty hardly is the only landlord seeking to push out nonpaying tenants as thousands of eviction suits have been filed in Miami-Dade County and the rest of the U.S. SPV Realty is entirely within its right as the Florida eviction moratorium has been lifted. But the circumstances surrounding its Design Place complex has thrust evictions there in the spotlight and made the filings notable as well as particularly infuriating for residents.

SPV Realty wants to wipe out Design Place for over 5 million square feet of new mixed-use real estate.

The 22-acre Design Place, on the southeast corner of Northeast 54th Street and Second Avenue in the Little Haiti neighborhood, has 512 units across multiple two-story buildings painted in pastel yellow, green and orange. For years it has offered a reprieve to low- and moderate-income renters from the high cost of Miami living. It’s not officially affordable housing but at $1,350 a month for a one bedroom, it’s more attainable than most of the rest of the city.

SPV Realty promises it will accommodate Design Place residents in its 20-story towers, allowing them to move in at the same rents they pay now. It has vowed to a slew of other community benefits, including an additional 75 affordable-housing units and public spaces open to everyone.

Therein lies the kernel of the complaints from residents and an opposition law firm: SPV Realty’s promises don’t match its actions given that the company is already evicting tenants.

“The fact is that SPV Realty was trying to have discussions about community benefits and keeping the community in place, but at the same time they are evicting these residents from Design Place and their properties during this pandemic right now,” said Denise Ghartey, an attorney with nonprofit public interest law firm Community Justice Project that has spoken out against the evictions and redevelopment. “It’s important to know that this developer is talking about community benefits, but they are also evicting folks at a point when people are going through some of the hardest circumstances in their lives.”

SPV Realty attorneys, Bilzin Sumberg partner Vicky Leiva and Lydecker | Diaz partner Stephen Hunter Johnson in Miami, didn’t provide comment for this report.

Neither did Robert Worman, the Plantation attorney who has filed the eviction suits on behalf of SPV Realty.

Project approval has stalled in front of a Miami planning board and at a December meeting Hunter Johnson addressed the evictions.

“This is not the landlord coming to wipe everyone out,” Hunter Johnson told the Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board on Dec. 2. “In fairness and clarity, they are dealing with their tenants the way everybody who is a landlord is dealing with their tenants. We’ve got to try to work this out together. So while I understand and appreciate the concerns of the community … we are trying to do the right thing.”

The number of evictions pales in comparison to the high number of Design Place units, he added.

Numbers

This year SPV Realty has filed 41 eviction suits against Design Place renters, according to the county clerk of courts.

Pre-pandemic in January and February, SPV Realty filed 12 suits and stopped once Gov. Ron DeSantis imposed a moratorium because of massive job losses.

Once the moratorium was weakened in late July to only stave off final action in a proceeding, SPV Realty filed 19 evictions in August and five in September, the clerks’ website shows.

On Oct. 1, the state moratorium expired altogether and SPV Realty followed with five filings in November, though it filed none in October and December.

Some of the cases have closed with a settlement between SPV Realty and a tenant agreeing on a payback schedule. Others are pending and yet others ended up like Murillo-Gonzalez’s case, with him fearing he’d be pushed out of his home any day as SPV Realty obtained a judgment and writ of possession.

Murillo-Gonzalez has remained in his unit likely because of a county moratorium prohibiting the Miami-Dade Police Department from executing writs of possession. County police are the only ones that can physically enforce writs.

The police department is only executing writs of possession for eviction cases filed before March 12, but not for cases filed after that when the pandemic started.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also offering a layer of protection as it has issued a moratorium on evictions against residents who can’t pay specifically because they lost their job due to the pandemic.

Renters facing an eviction lawsuit can file a CDC declaration in their court response. They have to prove they sought, but were unsuccessful in obtaining government rent assistance.

The CDC protection expires at the end of the year.

Human Toll

Ghartey, the Community Justice attorney, countered Hunter Johnson’s point that the number of Design Place evictions is low compared with the community’s size.

“One eviction is too much right now,” she said. “I don’t want this idea that a low number is OK.”

To gauge the toll of one eviction, just look to Design Place renter Vera de Souza.

Laid off since March from her Miami Midtown restaurant job as a server, she said she cries in her bathroom where no one can see, but allowed herself to choke up during a recent interview.

“Nobody thinks about us. I am sorry I am emotional but it’s suffocating. I am shaking from stress and nobody knows,” she said, holding back tears.

In the months immediately after the pandemic onset, SPV Realty asked her for back rent and she paid off once her unemployment trickled in, but then it dried up, she said. She made face masks for a while but they only sell at $5 or $10 each, de Souza said.

She is afraid of taking another restaurant job because she is helping take care of her newborn granddaughter and doesn’t want her to contract COVID-19.

“You start suffering because the manager is calling saying, ‘Listen, the owner needs to see money, Vera.’ And the depression. I have nights when I can’t sleep and I cry when no one can see. You have so much pressure,” she said.

In November, SPV Realty sued to evict de Souza, saying she failed to make payment after it issued her a three-day notice for over $5,000 in unpaid rent.

Murillo-Gonzalez’s stress from losing his job intensified as he was on the hook for the entire rent he used to split. His roommate left for California once the pandemic upended everything.

“You can’t sleep at night and you wake up in the morning and you have body aches. I notice my hair is falling out,” Murillo-Gonzalez said. “I am aging by the second.”

He keeps trying to find a job but comes up short despite 16 years of restaurant experience.

“The couple of places you go and apply and it’s like 10 people in front of you. It’s sad,” he said.

Single father Kendrick Waldron, whom SPV Realty sued to evict in August, hides how he feels so his 6-year-old son, Kenari, doesn’t see his dad distressed.

“I don’t want to see him see me all upset and feeling like we are not going to have a place to live. I just thank God we did make it this far,” he said, sighing.

Work at Waldron’s residential seawall construction job dried up once the pandemic started as clients were wary of having crews on their properties while the virus raged, he said.

The Process

The Design Place evictions are a microcosm of what’s going on nationwide with tenants who lost their jobs because of the coronavirus now being pushed out of their homes.

The issue illustrates how the legal process tends to swing in favor of landlords.

Most of these tenants are being sued for eviction for the first time, a traumatizing experience they don’t know how to navigate as they usually aren’t represented by an attorney while landlords are, Ghartey said.

“The eviction process creates many, many barriers to tenants. Access to information is super difficult. You need to file fairly particular paperwork within five days of receiving a complaint. A lot of the times people don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know how to file something with the court,” she said.

In Florida, tenants have to file a motion to determine rent within five days and deposit the disputed amount in a court registry, Ghartey said. They also are encouraged to file the CDC declaration in their court responses if they qualify and claim job loss due to the coronavirus.

If they don’t, the landlord usually would move for a default final judgment of possession and judges generally grant it, often without a hearing for the tenant or taking into account other factors.

Case in point: Murillo-Gonzalez and Waldron each filed court responses pleading their cases, saying they lost their jobs because of the lockdown and vowing to pay off what they owe once they return to work. All was in vain.

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Luis Perez-Medina struck Murillo-Gonzalez’s response, issuing a default final judgment of possession in October. Judge Diana Gonzalez-Whyte issued the same to Waldron also in October. Writs of possession followed.

The news of the outcome of his case took Waldron by surprise as he didn’t know about the writ until a reporter told him. He was just breathing a sigh of relief as he qualified for the Miami-Dade Emergency Rental Assistance Program to help him with rent.

“I am just waiting for them to process to pay the amount that is owed to Design Place,” Waldron said.

Whether the ERAP assistance would be enough to reverse the final order for possession against Waldron is unclear, but this illustrates another issue, Ghartey said.

There’s little opportunity for tenants to let the court know they are in conversations about rent assistance, she said.

There should be no evictions now but the Design Place ones are particularly egregious given SPV Realty’s promises to work with tenants when it comes to its new Eastside Ridge project, she added.

“To have a developer come in and say, ‘We care about the community. We want to talk about affordable housing and keep the community in place,’ but also filing swaths of evictions for people who are fighting for their lives is not in line with what they are saying,” Ghartey said.

De Souza, who has filed a motion to determine rent, said she is torn between using the unemployment money for rent or to save it to move out. She doesn’t entirely blame SPV Realty and says there should be government stimulus for landlords, in turn alleviating the burden on tenants.

“Someone,” she said, “needs to think about us.”