Miami Workers Center
Miami, FL

Study Tracks how Stimulus Affects Race, Poverty in Florida
By Nadege Charles
October 10, 2009

An early look at a study to be released in phases over the next year provides a glimpse into how stimulus spending will impact Florida's poorer communities.

Researchers from Ohio State, Florida International University and the Miami Workers Center will track racial biases of stimulus spending across four metropolitan regions - Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa and Miami-Dade.

At a town hall meeting last week at Harvest Fire Worship Center in Miami Gardens, leaders from several nonprofit and faith-based institutions gathered to discuss the study, called ``How Fair is Florida.''

``If we don't recover the communities that were in a recession before the recession, then we're only recovering the status quo,'' said Hashim Benford, a community organizer with the Miami Workers Center.

Florida expects to receive approximately $13 billion over three years of the recovery program.

In the first phase of the study, researchers found that nearly half of all loans made in Miami's urban core and Miami Gardens during 2004-2006 were predatory high cost loans.

For example, foreclosures have hit hard in Miami Gardens, with a homeownership rate of 73 percent in 2007, according the report.

``The recession made pre-existing inequalities worse,'' Benford said.

``We need to define what a fair recovery looks like.''

The study also examined how contracts valued at $330 million were dispersed to Florida-based firms as of Sept. 9. Black-owned firms have received 1.9 percent of the contracts, Hispanic firms, 6.1 percent and women-owned firms 1.6 percent.

``A lot of people don't know who, what, when and where the money is going,'' Don Clarke, senior pastor of Harvest Fire Worship Center, said.

One difficulty in tracking stimulus money by demographics is firms receiving money don't have the same address as the location of the contracted project or service, according to the study.

The first phase of the report recommends tracking contracts by race, gender and geography and creating targeted investments into the hardest hit communities.

The study should prompt policy makers to fill in the gap and consider attaching clauses to federal funds that come through individual municipalities, according to Miami Garden Councilman André Williams.

``It is upon us, as elected officials to say, `If you're going to do business here you have to hire in this community,' '' he said.