Pushing us off the island — gentrification, Artwashing, and rising seas in Miami.

They’re planning another mega project two blocks up the street. Towers with thousands of apartments shooting into the sky, great swathes of stores. It sounds like the one they want to build another two blocks up. They included plans for a park (or “open space”) in the second one, pretty pictures of green spaces with white people in them. Like anyone besides the people who can afford the apartments that will sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars will feel like they could go to that “park” amidst the antiseptic moonspires that were also in the pictures. Oh, and there’s another mega-project planned about six blocks up from the second one. Besides condos, retail, hotel, offices, that one also promises “entrepreneurship and innovation, technology, arts, and entertainment.” Lovely, no doubt, and also undoubtedly expensive.

All this is happening on a ten-block stretch of NE Second Avenue, a boundary of my micro-neighborhood, Buena Vista East, part of the larger neighborhood of Little Haiti. We’re just to the north of the Design District, which recently became one of the most expensive shopping malls in the world — Cartier, Prada, Hublot. Developers have been sucking up the quiet, slightly weary streets nearby. The church that was my polling place, where the ladies volunteering year after year knew my name, has…