Commentary: Democrats Corrupt Everything They Touch—Even Real Estate

In the aftermath of one of the most consequential elections in American history, a major question is how defeated Democrats will regroup. One answer can be found in Miami-Dade County and the city of Miami. This election, thanks to the dedicated work of local activists, the city and county shifted Red due to turnout from Republicans’ new crucial national demographic: working and middle class minorities. But Democrats haven’t given up vying for power, and in South Florida their infiltrations come by stealth and from a surprising place: real estate.

This is a story about how a free market triumph is being used for projects of top-down control. “Republicans know business but Democrats know management theories,” one Democratic insider told a reporter in the early 1990s, as the Clinton Administration used government to corrupt Ronald Reagan’s free market with environmental investments and housing schemes. An investigation of Miami real estate shows that Democrats are still running management plays today. In this case, they’re quietly buying up low-cost land to build sites promoting their ideology and masking their moves as supporting “growth.” In the process, they’re displacing the working- and middle-class minorities who form the crucial new component of the Republican political coalition. 

(Related: Weird Democrats and How They Hide It)

Miami as a Self-Governing Community—for Now

Miami is rightfully proud of its building boom. As Miami’s mayor Francis Suarez says, while other cities have fallen into crime and disrepair, Miami has developed a formula for America’s prosperity: “We keep taxes low, we keep people safe, and we lean into innovation,” becoming “the capital of capital.” But stealth operations from Leftists are using this growth to strike directly at Miami’s other decisive feature: the city’s identity as a self-determining immigrant and minority community closer to American cities circa 1900 than anything on our contemporary map. 

Miami’s self-determining identity runs deep. After 1960, while national “reformers” eradicated  America’s old ethnic wards from Boston to New York, replacing them with sprawling and unaccountable civil services in the name (of course) of “good management,” Cuban immigrants from Fidel Castro’s regime displaced Miami’s old-line developers and set the terms for living. They were followed by Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Hondurans, and others who shared their deep suspicion of arbitrary colonial power. Today Miami is an ethnic city whose politics reflect the mostly conservative beliefs of its cohesive, overlapping immigrant communities.

What may threaten this status quo is not the give-and-take of growth (rising prices, shifting income demographics) but its explicit channeling to empower developers, administrators, and experts in hock to global development agendas.

Working Class Neighborhoods as Sites of Progressive “Experimentation”

The sites of the possible threat are pockets of North Miami: parting gifts from mid-century planners who, following New York Democrats’ lead, cut highways through neighborhoods like Overtown. There and in Liberty City, Wynwood, and what would become Little Haiti, American blacks and later Haitian (and Puerto Rican) arrivals dealt with neighborhoods crippled by bad interstate planning as well as labor outsourcing. 

The first symptoms of these problems were riots, but the ultimate outcomes were opportunities for developers presented by low-cost land. It’s the latest of these opportunities, the Magic City Innovation District in Little Haiti, that has broken the back of residents’ patience, while also hinting at exactly what kind of Miami might be created off of an indiscriminate commitment to growth.

A Progressive Liberal Arrives in Miami…

The Magic City Innovation District is the brainchild of Tony Cho, a real estate investor with projects from Brickell to Wynwood and a CV far from Miami’s current brand of pragmatic innovation. 

Growing up, Cho lived in an ashram with his grandmother, who reinvented herself as “a charismatic and controversial guru named Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati” and “drew scores of followers and celebrity devotees such as…Julia Roberts” as well as “allegations of [creating] a controlling and abusive environment,” which Cho denies. At 17, he attended Northwestern University, which he thought “insufficiently progressive,” and “studied political science and international relations, aspiring to be president of the U.S.” 

Relocating to Miami, he got a real estate license and founded Metro 1, which built off his focus “repurposing old buildings, like warehouses, for the creative class” in low-cost areas like Wynwood. He also developed a commitment to preventing “‘undesired consequences for underserved communities [like] gentrification, cultural misappropriation, [and unaffordability].’” His boldest move so far has been the Magic City Innovation District: “transforming 18 acres of industrial warehouses and land in Little Haiti into a center for innovation, jobs and creativity…while providing an access point for jobs in an underserved community.” 

…And Invades a Working-Class Minority Community in the Name of “Progress”

Cho’s Magic City Innovation District promise of ensuring the benefits of development without their costs is appealing. But in his case, it’s false. One red flag comes from Little Haiti resident Marie Jefferson, who, according to the Miami Herald, saw the rent triple on the grocery store she owns at the hands of “new investors” attracted by cheap prices. She nearly closed. Another comes from “veteran Little Haiti activist Marleine Bastein,” commenting for the same Herald story, who stated that “the plan is not to develop Little Haiti, it is to erase Little Haiti.”

Cho, according to the story, “blamed the loss of Haitian businesses…on the neighborhood’s sagging economics.” But this wasn’t the first time he had been at odds with Little Haitians. The last conflict was over their successful proposal to officially put “Little Haiti” on Miami’s map. According to The Miami New Times, “a who's who of wealthy landowners and prominent developers,” including Cho, tried to block the proposal. They argued that “the boundaries of Little Haiti overlap” with the historically black neighborhood of Lemon City, which has organically been replaced by Haitian arrivals.

What’s the Deeper Liberal-Progressive Vision at Play?

Cho’s stand over putting Little Haiti on the map matches the view on the Magic City Innovation District’s website, which implies that change, or “progress,” or “the future,” is inevitable, but has to be managed correctly. This doesn’t necessarily mean putting communities in the drivers’ seat. Instead it seems to mean managers like Cho crafting development narratives, e.g. acknowledging “the [area’s] beginning: Lemon City”; its middle, when “Haiti finds a new home”; and its current era when “the future comes calling,” and “Little Haiti has a unique opportunity to be at the crossroads of progress” thanks to “developers… with… vision...” 

What might this managerial vision amount to?

The Magic City Innovation District’s website promises a ”master planned community” with a “walkable campus” and “learning programs and scholarships, funds for affordable housing and job training, environmental stewardship, and support for arts and cultural initiatives.” The specifics of this vision, beyond pre-retirement adults living in a “master planned community” and post-collegiate adults socializing around a “walkable campus,” aren’t clear. But others of Cho’s ventures give clues. 

One is his ChoZen retreat, “a secular, 18-acre eco-retreat center” in Sebastian, Florida, next to his grandmother’s ashram site. There, for a fee ($450 to $1500 “ticket/lodging options” for a “Full Moon Weekend” to “re-connect with the rituals of nature”) guests can join a “global community…to collaborate, cross-pollinate, and share their unique skillsets, knowledge, and wisdom...” 

Tony Cho’s Climate Boondoggle 

There’s also his Future of Cities initiative, “part real estate investment, part venture ecosystem and part think tank.” This catch-all initiative has its first full-scale project in an “opportunity zone” in Jacksonville, Florida, and has become enough of a priority that Cho recently sold his stake in the Magic City Innovation District, which in any case is developing sluggishly. But Cho still owns a multi-purpose warehouse on the Magic City Innovation District site in Miami, called “the Future of Cities Climate and Innovation Hub.” 

In December 2022, the Hub debuted as an event space. It “held hundreds of people, including [Democratic Miami-Dade] County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, for an event during Art Basel to…speak about a sustainable future for Miami,” since, in Cho’s view, thanks to its location and its population boom, “Miami need[s] to become the capital of innovation around climate solutions.” Levine Cava, who some Republicans believe will run for governor in 2024, agrees. According to one politically connected Republican who spoke to Restoration News,

Levine Cava uses the effects of growth she’s supposed to be addressing—but isn’t!—as excuses to push climate legislation. For example, there’s no infrastructure right now in Miami to cope with the new building, so where’s the water during tropical storms going to go other than in the street? That’s not climate change, that’s bad government. But the downtown floods and then progressives scream climate change. And Levine Cava talks about the Green New Deal and electric cars and new climate regulations. 

Cho has talked about climate change, too, not just at the Hub but in places like Davos. But his and Levine Cava’s predictions seem irrelevant in Miami, which is addressing rising sea levels in practical ways. The more applicable model is New York City: a template for where Tony Cho’s visions may lead.

The New York Warning to Miami

In New York City, beginning in 2002, the concerted efforts of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Amanda Burden, his Director of the Department of City Planning, made the city self-consciously “global.” This meant re-zoning 40 percent of the city to incentivize “growth” and attract tourists—displacing working and middle class New Yorkers with roots in the city who couldn’t pay the skyrocketing rents. These New Yorkers moved to the outer boroughs, causing the displacement of black and Latino communities in Brooklyn and the Bronx. 

The progressives who succeeded Mayor Bloomberg mostly continued his policies. Today Manhattan houses billionaires and young finance professionals and illegal aliens bringing cheap labor. In the vacuum of the responsible working-and-middle class politics that used to make Manhattan run has come administrative aggression, particularly heavy-handed environmental regulations on businesses and citizens. Academics from MIT and Princeton have proposed that New York become a “playground city” that caters to young, middle-upper-and-upper income inhabitants likely to stay for only the short-term. In place of the old neighborhoods are Left-leaning nonprofits and multi-millionaire-backed communist communities like the Peoples’ Forum which give young, low-earning, alienated New Yorkers a place to belong.

The Left’s Stealth Miami Mobilizing 

Thanks to New York’s influence, Miami now has an Underline, a “linear park” that runs under the city’s metrorail and sort of borrows from New York’s High Line: an “elevated linear park” sponsored by Mayor Bloomberg and his political allies that remade the Lower West Side into a destination for wealthy tourists. Today the High Line features environmental propaganda and Black Lives Matter propaganda, and it’s recognized as one of the earliest initiatives of the “new” New York whose terms are set by progressive liberal managers. The Underline, by contrast, is much more Miami: it has basketball courts and picnic benches. What the Underline and another High Line-inspired development nearby suggests is twofold: Miami is far from the Big Apple’s reality, but is also looking to the Big Apple as a model. In this context, it’s not encouraging that a hotel development built in conjunction with the Underline is part-sponsored by Tony Cho.

It’s not just Cho. Some community activists who mobilized against Little Haiti’s development are embracing broader climate agendas linked to LGBTQIA+ issues, gender, and race. If Miami continues to see an arrival of moderates, liberals, or progressives who are part of a new corporate culture imported from failing cities in blue states, Cho and these activists may encounter an increasingly friendly voting base. 

Interestingly, considering Tony Cho’s early passion for politics and his adopted mother’s reputed passion for control, the path he wants for Miami represents politics of a kind many of its residents know from their home countries: colonialism in the guise of progress; rule in the name of a future of growth by a narrow few. And it’s the Republican Party whose vital new constituencies, working- and middle-class minority communities, are most threatened by this stealth progressive agenda.

What to Do?

Preventing progressive infiltrations from becoming realities doesn’t mean scaling back on investing in Miami’s future. But it does mean investing with discrimination, deliberation, and transparency. This, in turn, involves approaching “development,” often perceived as an apolitical matter of permitting and oversight and zoning, as a political act. This is especially the case in low-cost areas of the city that give people like Cho—managerial progressives with “visions” of control—the chance to realize them.

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