"How can I help?" With a radical focus on developing local talent

When Mayor Francis X. Suarez tweeted “How can I help?” it unleashed a tsunami that had been years in the making. For over a decade, numerous organizations like the Knight Foundation and eMerge Americas had been diligently investing in creating the right conditions for a thriving tech startup ecosystem in South Florida. It has now been over two years since the tweet that put Miami in the tech zeitgeist, and the action has lived up to the hype: Silicon Valley venture capital giants like Andreessen Horowitz put down stakes in the Miami area and Ken Griffin moved Citadel's headquarters from Chicago to the waterfront in Brickell. The growing tech startup scene, along with the billions in venture capital, should signal progress for the region—and while this growth is indeed good for the local economy, if the growth translates exclusively to importing expensive talent to South Florida, it could lead to mass displacement and continued gentrification.

In the wake of the #MiamiTech wave, South Florida has become the epicenter of the housing crisis, with wages remaining relatively flat while a scarce and constrained housing market meets increasing demand from domestic and international buyers alike. In the City of Miami, the median household income is roughly $44,000. In contrast, rents in South Florida rose over 24% between July 2021 and July 2022, to an average of $34,092 a year, and they are expected to continue to rise as we embark into 2023. This is causing locals to flee west and south to the few affordable pockets still left, and further away from job opportunities. 

Unabated growth, without a disciplined focus on strengthening workforce development infrastructure, could be long term counterproductive for the region. My perspective is coming from lived experience. I spent most of my career in the Silicon Valley, having left my native South Florida over a decade ago before returning in October of 2020.  We’ve seen the canary in a coal mine with cities like San Francisco, where the tech boom brought tremendous wealth and talent to the region, but also set into motion what we now know to be one of the highest levels of household income inequality in the country, triggering mass displacement and increasing the number of people experiencing homelessness in the growing and desperate tent encampments across the city. I had a front row seat to the unfortunate consequences of displacement, gentrification, and eventually desperation as the “the most empty downtown in America” came into being. 

To get ahead of these potential challenges being replicated in South Florida, we must be committed to equitable access to economic opportunity. As jobs are created in the area, there must be investment to enhance the local labor force. This can happen through both traditional educational pathways like Miami-Dade College, as well as non-traditional pathways like employer-backed credentialing bootcamps and apprenticeship programs. With nearly two-thirds of new jobs requiring either high or medium-level digital skills, it is also imperative that no matter the approach, digital proficiency be at the heart of how we prepare South Floridians for inclusion in an increasing digital workforce. If balanced properly with work readiness skills and other essential proficiencies around innovation, creativity and teamwork, our local workforce can be best-in-class. We must double down on solutions like CodePath , which focus on ensuring that the tech talent pipeline is as diverse as Miami, and efforts like Opportunity Miami and Workforce Miami which offer an early glimpse as to what can be done collectively, with public-private partnership at the helm. 

South Florida is a preview of what the United States will be in the coming decades. It is a majority minority community, with over 85% of its population being of Latino or African American descent and over 54% foreign born—myself included. This makes South Florida a critical cultural launchpad for tech diversity, and ultimately a launchpad for successful companies, since we know that more diverse companies outperform those who lack ethnic and cultural diversity by 36% in profitability. 

There are many trends that have contributed to South Florida’s housing crisis: controversial development policies; climate-related gentrification; and a boom in demand from hawkish property buyers attracted to South Florida by the lure of tax policies, proximity to Latin American, and of course, the region’s exquisite beaches. While it would be too narrow to attribute South Florida’s housing crisis to #MiamiTech, the movement is uniquely positioned to contribute to the solution.

We can be intentional about designing a social contract that is still attractive and compelling to investors, entrepreneurs and large corporations, while simultaneously elevating values of sustainability, transparency and accountability that ensure that we safeguard the most valuable asset of the South Florida community—its people.

In What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill makes a case that “positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.” We must balance the short-term appetite for a boost in the local economy with the outlook of doing what is right for the region over the next century. As major companies and investors come to South Florida, we should embrace them with that welcoming “how can I help” attitude, while also setting the tone for the type of society we’re building and the expectations we have—to invest in local talent and help strengthen the local infrastructure that is preparing South Floridians for the future of work. In doing so, we’ll create a local economy that is more representative, accessible, and that ultimately works, for everyone.