Living surrounded by luxury may be the dream of many, but for Orlando Capote it has been a headache.
In 1989, he moved with his parents to a house on a quiet and sunny street in southwest Miami, without imagining that almost 25 years later he and his property would enter into a dispute with a large real estate consortium.
“When we arrived in this country in 1969, the rent was about US$150 or US$200 a month, but it went up and up. And my dad always wanted to have a house. It is the American dream and one works to achieve that dream,” Capote tells BBC Mundo with nostalgia.
“The three of us bought it, my mom, my dad, and me,” he explains of the modest one-story home on Coconut Grove Dr, a few blocks from downtown Coral Gables, a city in Miami-Dade County that It has homes valued at millions of dollars.
Today Capote no longer has any known neighbor. Now he lives surrounded by the luxurious buildings of The Plaza, a US$600 million real estate development that includes a 242-room hotel, exclusive restaurants and shops, offices and high-end residential apartments.
Your property actually adjoins buildings up to 10 stories high that have blocked your sunlight and breezes. Even the view to the front of his house is obstructed by some large planters from the real estate development that Capote calls “the coffins.”
“We are immigrants. My parents left everything in Cuba to bring me here. And they worked a lot. And here they took away the American dream and gave it to the developer,” laments the 64-year-old engineer.
And it is that for him, the government of Coral Gables gave all the facilities to a real estate firm at the expense of his rights and his access to public services that every resident of the city has.
After nearly two decades of bickering and pressure, he says he’s more determined than ever not to leave.
the lonely house
Those who live in Coral Gables have seen in the last 20 years the rapid construction of residential and commercial towers in the financial area of what is called the City Beautiful (beautiful city).
The carefully landscaped concrete blocks contrast with the densely tree-lined streets, lined with single-story houses, surrounding the commercial sector.
Orlando and Lucía Capote, with their son Orlando, settled in one of these residential areas in 1989. Until the early 2000s they were surrounded by neighbors, who little by little began to leave.
First came a well-known investor from Coral Gables, Cuban-American Rafael “Ralph” Sánchez. Like other developers, at the time he was taking advantage of Miami’s real-estate frenzy to build condominiums and commercial projects.
In 2004, the purchase of land began in the block where the Capotes lived.
As recorded in the county’s public records, demolitions began a year later, and by 2007 there was only one building left on the block to be demolished, a former city building listed for its historic value, and the house of the Cuban immigrant family.
That year Sánchez presented his project that included 42 villas in three-story buildings, priced at US$1.9 million each, and with the Mediterranean style that Coral Gables founder George Merrick gave to the entire city.
“Merrick believed that everyone deserved to live in a beautiful environment that fit into the natural environment,” Sánchez told theSouth Florida Business Journal. “His plans for him to create this environment in Coral Gables included lush landscaping, artistic entrances and plazas, and old Spanish cobblestone streets, plans that we have revived.”
But the Capote family turned down any offer to buy, for they had their reasons.
The proposal
Capote, as a professional engineer, prides himself on not being naive about the Miami real estate market. In fact, he says his motto is: “I’d rather make a deal with the devil than with a real estate developer, because the devil is going to honor his contract, and you’ll never know about the developer.”
He says that he was not impressed by the acquisitions and sales of his surroundings. “In 2004, half the people who lived here rented. The owners were investors. When they saw the bubble of 2006, it was the opportunity to sell them”.
“The other half had their reasons,” like inheritances or the opportunity to make a sale. “It was in their interest to do it,” Capote acknowledges.
But at that time his family situation was delicate. His father, he explains, was sick and frequently had to be admitted to the hospital. The family came and went from the clinic.
“One of those nights, a real estate agent knocks on the door and wants to buy the house. My mom explains that her husband was in the hospital, but he didn’t seem to care about her. That experience is part of the fact that we don’t believe in anyone,” she recalls.
The real estate firm at the time made an offer of more than US$900,000 for the property, but was rejected outright.
“At the time, with my dad and his situation in the hospital, and me hearing and asking what the houses were worth, there was no way I could do it. Taking care of my dad, looking for a house, moving… After all, it took us 20 years to find that house”, he recalls.
Demolitions in the surrounding area continued to prepare the ground for the large complex now standing on the site. But the 2008 financial crisis broke out, caused precisely by a housing bubble in the United States.
If they had sold their house, Capote says, quoting an old Cuban saying, “we would have stayed like the Morón rooster: without feathers and crowing.”
“I’m not going to sign anything”
Orlando Capote’s father died before seeing the demolition of the houses around his.
For about 10 years, the solitary house stood in the middle of a 2.8-hectare piece of land where not much happened.
The Sánchez project was taken up, with modifications, by the real estate developer Agave Holdings, a venture capital firm that acquired the land of the block and an adjacent one of almost one hectare.
“In 2013 it was when three girls came to the house and wanted me to sign that we were going to sell it to them. I told them no. I was younger, I had more testosterone, more adrenaline and I exploded. But my mom said ‘No, don’t slam the door, talk to them,’” Capote recalls.
“I told them ‘I’m not going to sign this for you or I’m going to sign anything you bring us.'”
Some time later, they left him an offer for an exchange that included another nearby home and a vehicle.
Capote suspected that all this was a plan for the efforts to change land use and modify the streets and the environment for the new project. But having a resident with a single-family home created problems for those changes.
“The proposal was legally deficient. I gave it to several lawyers who said this was not legally required. And it wasn’t so much an offer, but rather a trap so that the city would see that we were negotiating”, points out the engineer.
In 2019, as Capote fought before Coral Gables governing committees to defend the driveways to his street and back alley, massive construction broke out on The Plaza Coral Gables and the other Agave Holdings developments that filled with heavy machinery, noise, dust and road cuts to the entire block.
Sadly for the resident of Coconut Grove Dr., a misfortune occurred at that time that he had tried to prevent.
“couldn’t come back”
“November 18, 2019: my mom fell in the kitchen,” Capote recalls, holding back tears.
“I couldn’t get it up. That’s when I called the rescue and they came from behind the house. Naturally they couldn’t take her from behind, they had to come from the front. Why couldn’t they come ahead? Because there was a large construction team in front of the doors that were supposed to give access to the house, ”she continues.
“They could not. They had to park more than 200 feet from the house [60 metros]They had to put my mom on a stretcher and take her to the corner.”
Lucía Capote was admitted to a hospital and later transferred to rehabilitation. She never returned to her house. “She couldn’t come back,” says her son, regretting having gone through such an experience.
He denounces that his right to access emergency services was violated as his street was blocked. Also that there were undue modifications in the rear service alley that prevented the rescue of his mother. He warns that the fire regulations were violated.
His arguments at the Coral Gables government public hearings, in which the real estate developer also participated, were dismissed without justification, he says.
When questioned by BBC Mundo about the case, the city government said that “the issues raised have been extensively reviewed and investigated” and that the developer obtained the necessary permits from Miami-Dade County.
“For the irony of life,” he recalls, in his office he was assigned a project to open an access road for firefighters to the facilities of a Miami Metrorail University station.
“When I went to the hospital, to the intensive care area where my mother was, at the entrance, next to me, was the head of the Coral Gables Fire Department. The same one to whom I sent so many letters because of the closure of the street before my mother fell, ”he recalls.
“I said, ‘Look, guess who did the paperwork for you to have your way to the fire entrance? Guess who did that?’ I don’t think the Coral Gables City Fire Department is responsible. But that was one of life’s ironies and coincidences.”
“Leave me at my house”
These ordeals have strengthened Capote’s determination to defend his home.
“I have been asked if I have become cynical. You have no idea how cynical I’ve become. But somehow I have never lost faith. After all, this is a country of laws. And you have to follow them. If the city, the county, the country is not destroyed…”, he says.
The construction hassles are over. But other complications have remained, such as the detours he has to do to enter the alley enabled by the real estate development to give him access to the back of his property.
Today the sun only enters the middle ioday in her house, while the rest of the day there are only the shadows of the large buildings that surround her.
His mango tree in the front yard has stopped bearing fruit this year. He has had trouble collecting his trash, a right that any Coral Gables resident has.
And inches from his property line, he is about to open a bar that, according to the law, can stay open until 2 am.
“If the government takes something from you, it has to do it through due process and with fair compensation. The audits did not follow the correct procedure. They took away our right in a process that was not legal. Our rights to light, air, and visibility have been taken away from us, ”he points out.
Despite everything, Capote says that he will stay in his house, because as long as he continues to pay his taxes and comply with the laws of Coral Gables, the property will remain his and no one will be able to take him out of it. His home, he assures, will never be for sale.
“Leave me in my house, with my memories and with the mango tree that no longer bears mangoes.”
Keep reading:
· Girlfriend and lover team up to beat up a cheater in the middle of a Florida brewery; Hispanics were charged with assault
· Relative of Ecuadorian soccer player Piero Hincapié, who had been kidnapped, is released
· Carlos Vives breaks the silence about the ‘like’ in the photo of Gerard Piqué with Clara Chía Martí
See original article on BBC