By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Mechy Paez Polo is content to live in a pleasant shelter for homeless seniors now that her true home, with her husband Orlando Polo, is gone.
She compares herself to a bird that can’t fly anymore. “I have a wing,” the Cuban native said in halting English, extending an arm. “I don’t have another wing.”
Her 81-year-old husband died in April when his heart gave out. Five months earlier, the couple had gratefully moved from a van into Mia Casa (Spanish for My Home) in North Miami.
Seniors like the Polos are the new face of homelessness. With fixed incomes failing to match the spiking costs of items ranging from groceries to uncontrolled rent, about one in four homeless people is 55 or older.
The elderly form an expanding subgroup of homeless in Miami-Dade County, where the wildly inflating cost of living is pushing residents from the bottom of the middle class into poverty.
When Mia Casa opened on March 31, 2023, it was the Homeless Trust’s first senior living facility. The Miami-Dade County agency manages a dedicated fund for homeless programs sustained by a 1 percent food and beverage tax.
One-hundred-twenty Mia Casa residents pay a fee of 30 percent of their income for a bed in a well-lit, cheerful place with a simpatico staff. Some like the Polos escaped from vans or other makeshift motorized “homes;” others fled the streets, where they were even more vulnerable to crime and bad weather.
NO ‘PUBLIC CAMPING’ HERE
As of Oct. 1, they also are vulnerable to a new state edict against “public camping.” The law puts the onus on municipalities to segregate the homeless — they can be placed in “encampments” for a year — or else local officials must prepare to defend against costly lawsuits any aggrieved citizen or the state may file after Jan. 1, 2025.
In Miami-Dade Ron Book, the lawyer/lobbyist who chairs the Homeless Trust and has served on its board for 30 years, is hell-bent on ending homelessness in his lifetime.
“Three decades is a long time to do anything. The only reason I’m still doing it is it’s not done,” Book said. “My mother taught me to finish what I start.”
He’s the main force behind an upcoming move of 130 to 150 seniors from shelters to permanent housing at the Cutler Bay LaQuinta Inn. The county just agreed to buy the motel for $14 million.
Contractors are pricing out kitchenettes and other renovations to transform motel rooms into about 105 tiny apartments. Using donated supplies, Book said, “we believe we can do what needs to be done for less than budget, not $6,000 [per unit] but under $2,000.” He hopes the first tenants can move in before Dec. 31, maybe even by Christmas.
The overall plan is to operate rent-controlled housing that the Homeless Trust owns and renovates debt-free. “The income from tenants becomes a separate account, like mini- LLCs, where they stand on their own to build up enough money so that our formerly homeless people never get subjected to special assessments,” Book said.
“Our tenants don’t ever have to worry about having increases that force them to move and either become homeless again or disrupt their continuity of living,” he said. “My goal when I retire from homelessness is to have this model so dialed in that I don’t have to worry that six months or six years or 12 years from now I’ll have to re-engage to fix a piece that gets broken.”
MECHY & ORLANDO’S SAGA
It’s too soon to say whether Mechy, as everyone calls her, will be a LaQuinta pioneer. She doesn’t seem keen to leave Mia Casa, although she likes the permanent housing idea.
“People need to live under one roof where they feel secure and they can take a shower,” Mechy said. About homelessness she said, “I love this country and I am confident the problem isn’t the big deal. More important is the solution.”
As for herself, “I feel good here. I have many friends and they have everything here.” Mechy appreciates sitting down to three meals a day, especially if the food isn’t the yummy fried Cuban cuisine she grew up eating because “it’s not healthy.”
Mechy is 69, more than a decade younger than her husband, his protege as well as his partner for 40 years. She intends to turn Orlando’s diaries and the other papers cluttering her private space – an area she politely dissuaded a Florida Bulldog reporter from entering – into a book.
She has a dramatic, yet joyful immigrant’s story to tell.
Mechy described Orlando as a scientist, artist and, primarily, activist who “rallied people about the economy, housing, the environment.” He walked the island of Cuba with a dog named Rex, meeting folks along the way who remembered them years later.
Orlando’s idealism collided with communist realpolitik in the late 1980s when he led protests against construction of the Juragua Nuclear Power Plant near the port city of Cienfuegos. It was a massive, $2.5-billion joint Soviet Union-Cuban project that raised concerns about “a potential Chernobyl in our own backyard,” then-U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-FL, said.
The Cuban government insisted there was no internal backlash, but the Los Angeles Times managed to find and interview at least one protester.
“A tiny ecologist-pacifist group called Sendero Verde [Spanish for Green Trail] does exist and opposes the nuclear program, but is not legally recognized by the government. Its leader, Orlando Polo, says he has been frequently arrested by police as a ‘counter-revolutionary,’“ the newspaper reported on Jan. 28, 1990.
STRANDED IN AMERICA
Eventually the nuclear plant project was abandoned.
In 1991 the Polos found themselves stranded in the U.S. because they refused to pay a visa fee to Cuba that Orlando considered unjust. They came to America to attend an environmental symposium and wound up joining the Cuban exile community in Miami.
The Polos took jobs that didn’t pay well but left them free to fight for their causes. They produced radio programs on the environment, organic food and the holistic approach to health. Mechy worked as a therapist; Orlando worked at the airport. They ran a juice bar in Coral Gables.
“It was very up and down, more down than up sometimes,” Mechy said. “We lived a very simple life, no Mercedes-Benz, a little car.”
About five years ago, it all collapsed: Painful pancreatic cancer put Mechy in the hospital and then a wheelchair. The landlord raised the monthly rent for the Polos’ Little Havana apartment from $600 to $1,029. The couple tried to send Mechy’s adored mother, who had been staying with them, to live with another daughter.
Mechy’s mother died in a retirement home, and she fell into depression. The Polos retreated to their van. They moved around and parked in a CVS lot.
This went on for years. Every so often, Mechy would hear about a shelter but it wouldn’t be right – families only, no place for an elderly couple.
One day a social worker named Dulce (Spanish for sweet) called and said, “I have two beds in Mia Casa,” Mechy said. “I don’t have a bed, I don’t have anything and she called me and she brought me here.”
NOT TOO PROUD TO BEG
Now Mechy has her Orlando book to finish, friends to visit with, healthy food to eat and a space of her own. The Polos’ lifelong commitment to activism left them without a nest egg, pension or Social Security.
Ron Book said Mechy’s financial hardship wouldn’t prevent her from moving to LaQuinta. She’d qualify for a needs-based rent voucher from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He’s worried about the many other seniors, younger individuals and families who remain homeless. Miami-Dade has about 1,000 unhoused people.
“I’m out of money,” Book said. He found a vacant, 316-unit development that’s available immediately but “somebody’s gotta find me more money.”
Book said he’s counting on voters in Miami Beach and Bal Harbour passing ballot measures next month that will extend the county’s 1 percent food and beverage tax to their municipalities. The tax applies to restaurants that serve alcohol and gross more than $400,000 a year. (Miami Beach and Bal Harbour were exempted because they pay a resort tax.)
And when your name is Book, you know how to lobby intensively. “Even people like me aren’t immune from begging,” he said.
If anyone has a direct line to Taylor Swift, he’d appreciate a call.
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