$115 million affordable community rises where an abandoned trailer park once sat; residents talk about welcome, dignity, and a home — not just a roof
By Nada Khalaf-Jones
Special to the South Dade News Leader
HOMESTEAD — From Angela Boykin’s balcony at Building 2, Naranja Grand spreads out in pale walls and grey roofs, palm trees, and a parking lot marked with white arrows. Beyond the last building, a blue lake. Across the water, new construction is rising. String lights tangle in the black railing. Down below, the grounds are clean and tended. At the corner of the building, a bus stop sits like a small promise. Across the road, steps from the front door, the Naranja Branch Library sits in easy reach — the kind of walk residents can make without getting in a car.
Ribbon day at the pool
On Monday, Sept. 14, partners cut a blue “GRAND OPENING” ribbon at the pool. The smiles on the deck were loud. The work to get here was not.
Boykin wants one thing clear in the paper: staff came through when her situation was hard and walked people from application to move-in. “I felt so welcome right at that moment,” she said. “They fought for us behind the scenes.”
Norge Rodriguez returned to Miami, faced a housing crisis, and was welcomed into Naranja Grand. She still works. Now she lives here. She said she sleeps at peace.
Naranja Grand I and II rise along SW 147th Avenue — a $115 million, 320-unit affordable community built by Housing Trust Group and Elite Equity Development where an abandoned trailer park once sat. About 120 apartments serve seniors 55 and older; about 200 serve families.
Dignity where the trailers stood
Vice Chairman Kionne L. McGhee, District 9, grew up in those trailers. He understands the library next door. The people inside the old park were deserving people, he said, and the ones still here “deserve dignity similar to everyone else across this country.” There was resistance. “Even COVID stepped in and tried to prevent this from happening,” McGhee said. “But when it is for you, it is for you.”
Matthew A. Rieger, president and CEO of Housing Trust Group, put the change in plain numbers and then in plain hope. Financing is complicated, deadlines unforgiving, obstacles real — but when public and private partners share the same urgency and refuse to give up, “these obstacles can be overcome.”
“320 homes now stand where an abandoned trailer park once sat,” Rieger said. “That isn’t merely a change in the landscape. It’s a change in the trajectory of hundreds of lives.”
He spoke of seniors on fixed incomes and working families forced into impossible choices — a parent who can give a child a stable place to grow up; a worker who can live nearer the job and spend more time with loved ones. “That is what affordable housing should be,” he said. “Not simply a roof, but a home where life can flourish.”
Mayor Levine Cava on affordability
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava spoke at the opening and joined the ribbon cut. She said the work is to affirm, once and for all, that affordability is on everyone’s minds. “The biggest challenge to affordability is the price of housing,” she said — and the rents, she said, are too high. Projects like these, and all the forces that come together, “provide dignity,” especially for people entering retirement age: “We want to take good care of them as they take good care of us.”
Elite Equity partners Nicole and Roosevelt Bradley stood with the officials. Nicole Bradley said quality development was at the forefront when she and her dad started the firm, and that partnering with HTG was “the best partnership to get this done.”
From Building 2, Boykin’s balcony still looks over grass, palms, and that water. Kids and neighbors can walk across the street to the library. Seniors can wait at the bus stop on the corner. The trailer park is gone. What remains is a place built to be kept — and a chance that already belongs to the people who got through the door.
Gallery (PIN 1941)
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