The Fire
On April 23, 2007, Umoja Village celebrated six months since its founding by announcing several campaigns, including the replacement of the wood shanties with more durable hexayurts (autonomous building); building a water well; engaging in local anti-gentrification and pro-housing campaigns; demanding legal rights to the land from the City of Miami; and plans to acquire land and build low-income housing.
On April 26, 2007, on the day the first hexayurts were scheduled to be built, Umoja Village burned to the ground in a mysterious fire. There were no casualties or injuries. Miami police arrested 11 residents and activists for attempting to remain on the land, and the City erected a barbed wire fence around the property that same day.
In order to avoid protests, the City offered Take Back the Land the property in order to build low-income housing before reneging on the offer under pressure from local power brokers and lobbyists.
On October 23, 2007, Take Back the Land announced it had identified vacant public and private foreclosed homes and had moved families into some of those homes, in a move it calls "liberating" housing. As of February 2008, Take Back the Land had a waiting list of 14 families waiting to move into one of those homes.
In February, Max Rameau released a book detailing the experience. The book is entitled Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown.
Read more about this topic: Umoja Village
Famous quotes containing the word fire:
“Of what use were it, pray, to get a little wood to burn, to warm your body this cold weather, if there were not a divine fire kindled at the same time to warm your spirit?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let it be forgotten as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold.”
—Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)