Are you a tourist or recent arrival looking to experience an authentic slice of Miami’s beautiful, messy, chaotic mix of cultures, people, and cuisines? Of course not! You just want the most Instagramable backgrounds to rub in your friends’ faces while they freeze to death up north. So, let’s embark on a tour of some of Miami’s most gentrified neighborhoods that’ll serve as your next post’s perfect prop.

Wynwood

Imagine the venues that granted Wynwood its unique sense of place: Wynwood Yard, Wood Tavern, Pilo’s Tequila, Square Pie, Electric Pickle, Beaker & Gray, Wynwood Diner, Moon Taxi. Now imagine them all dead, dusted, and paved over to make way for some fluorescently lit, organic, all-natural, detox, antioxidant, New England suppository franchise. Only Gramps is still holding on by its fingertips for the real Miami crowd. Once they go, lower the flag and turn off the lights because it’ll all finally be over.

The local galleries? Gone forever to Opa Locka, Ocala, or anywhere else they can actually afford the rent only to be replaced by bedazzled Damien Hirst knockoff Funko Pop retailers. For fuck’s sake, even Wynwood Walls—the ostensible epicenter of the entire neighborhood—isn’t open to the public without admission. After all, does your IG pic next to a two-story depiction of the Monopoly Man really count if you didn’t pay for it?

Speaking of art, picture the stunning local street murals that gained the neighborhood its world-renowned tastemaker status. Now picture them all smashed to bits by a wrecking ball and replaced by soulless, gray, medium rise, city-square-block swallowing condominiums. Wandering through the canyonized streetscape, can you even be sure you’re not in Williamsburg? Navy Yard? Logan Square? Who the fuck knows?? Developers only care that some venture capital bro and his influencer girlfriend are happy to pay $6,000 a month to let their followers watch them TikTok dance on the corpse of Miami’s Disney Land version of an arts district.

East Brickell (formerly Little Havana)

Awwww! Did you just see a rooster clucking around a traffic medium? How cute! Is that old man muttering to himself in Spanish while struggling down the block with a walker? How quaintly ethnic! Hold up… is that… a santería offering… in front of… your favorite gastropub!? BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND WITH RIGHTEOUS FIRE!!!

Lucky for you, the Hunnic hordes of rapacious Brickell real estate investors have been attempting to purge Little Havana of any semblance of cultural identity for more than a decade. Only, instead of constructing pyramids from the skulls of their slain enemies, they erect enormous steel phalluses along Miami’s westward-expanding skyline.

Subtropical Manifest Destiny is the point. Does it matter that they’re erasing the beating heart of Miami’s Cuban community to make way for Californian coders? No! Is the City of Miami doing anything to ensure this historically affordable neighborhood remains a refuge for working class locals who service those techies? Fuck no! Let them commute from their uncle’s efficiency in Hialeah until it too is successfully rebranded as the next “Brooklyn of Miami.”

Neo-Lemon City (formerly Little Haiti)

Denizens of Brickell, Edgewater, Midtown, and other coastal communities have been flummoxed for years by Biscayne Bay’s pesky insistence on flooding their streets, houses and businesses. After all, these well-heeled residents pay far too hefty a premium to ruin their sockless leather loafers. Nevertheless, rather than doing something crazy like taking steps to mitigate against the Atlantic’s ever-encroaching waters, Miami’s elected officials and developers are busy pondering a far more pressing question: Why the hell are all those Black people’s ankles so dry?

You see, when Miami was built, the white elite reserved the most expensive shoreline properties for themselves while redlining the Black workers who built their mansions onto “undesirable” ground farther inland. That ground also turns out to be at a higher elevation, which suddenly makes it far more desirable to all those Brickellites with soaked Magnannis. So what if 30,000 Haitian Americans created a vibrant, thriving community exactly where a hedge fund wants to build a luxury high-rise? That never stopped good ol’ American crony capitalism before!

Cue the bulldozers! Cue the construction cranes! Cue the CIA! Cue the Marines! Cue the landing craft—sorry, sorry, force of habit. Three invasions in 30 years will do that. We’re assaulting Little Haiti, not Port au Prince. Call off the Navy and the spooks—for now.

Indian Creek Village

We’ve all been there. Your family spent centuries accumulating power and oppressing dark people until they could finally boast ownership of 14% of a medium-sized Latin American country. Sure, there might’ve been some light genocide and/or slavery and/or ballot stuffing along the way, but your ancestors earned that blood money fair and square so you could blow it on a $24 million Mediterranean Revival villa in Indian Creek Village.

That is, until some asshole who own 18% of the next Latin American country over waltzes in and offers $50 million cash for an equivalent house right down the block! Even worse, Jeff Bezos, Jared Kushner, and Tom Brady each bought their lots for $120 million apiece!

How are you supposed to keep up with those property taxes!? And where are you supposed to move if you can’t?? Coco Plum? Hibiscus Island? Or (perish the thought!) Coral Freaking Gables?!? What will stop the hoi polloi from ogling your house, and your cars, and your designer handbags with their gross, plebian, coal dust-encrusted eyes without a moat, 20-foot electrified fence, and 24-hour security? You’re the real victim! You deserve restitution for America’s hyper-oligarchic takeover of your base-oligarchic America. If only there were justice in the world…

In Conclusión

Maybe none of the above locations pique your interest. No worries! Basically every neighborhood in the city is gentrified to shit. Coconut Grove, Allapattah, Liberty City, Homestead, Miami Beach, Doral, North Miami, South Miami, West Miami, Westchester, Kendall; throw a dart at a map of the county and you’re almost certain to hit a Whole Foods, Equinox, or trendy fusion restaurant. There are still pockets of Miami authenticity interspersed between rapaciously invasive postmodernist condo towers, but they’ll be gone soon enough—thereby ensuring no mid-tier influencer must ever live with the horror of seeing a Miami native accidentally wander into the background of their next livestream.

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Andrew Otazo

'Miami Creation Myth' author Andrew Otazo has advised officials on Cuba policy, worked for the Mexican president, fired a tank, and ran with 30lbs of trash.

Check out the first free chapter of Andrew’s upcoming book here.