Road 74 bisects Charlotte County, running fifty miles due east from the Gulf Coast town of Punta Gorda toward Lake Okeechobee. It cuts a perfectly straight line through sparse, featureless fields dotted with herds of grazing cattle. Tom Beddard had provided me with the address of Lady Moon Farms, his mixed vegetable operation, but it had been twenty minutes since I last saw a street sign, house number, or for that matter, anything I would classify as a building.
My cell phone rang. It was Beddard. “Where are you now?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“You’ll see our packinghouse on the north side of the road. Can’t miss it,” he assured me.
A few miles farther along the highway, I pulled into a sandy parking lot in front of a beige warehouselike building. The place looked deserted—no other vehicles in the lot, no workers scurrying about, no sign reassuring a visitor that this lonely outpost was, indeed, Lady Moon Farms. I got out of my car. No one answered my knock on the front door. Around the side of the building, a lift truck stood idle beside some parked tractors and wagons. Assuming that I had stopped at the wrong place, I turned back to my car. Then I noticed a white pickup truck speeding toward the building on a lane between the rows. It stopped beside me. A middle-aged man with short salt-and-pepper hair looked me over from head to toe before unfolding himself from behind the wheel. He administered the sort of no-nonsense handshake you’d expect from a six-foot-five-inch, sun-weathered farmer. “Jump in, I’ll show you around the farm.”
I had come to Lady Moon to see the all but impossible, if the horticulturalists I had spoken with were to be believed. Since the late 1990s, Beddard had been growing tomatoes and other vegetable crops in South Florida using purely organic practices—no synthetic chemical fertilizers or pesticides—and succeeding on a commercial scale. Lady Moon Farms is the largest organic grower on the East Coast. Whole Foods Market is one of its major customers. In order to maintain a year-round supply of products, Beddard farms 850 acres in South Florida, 450 acres in Georgia, and 300 acres in Pennsylvania. “When I first came down here, everyone told me that you can’t do organic in Florida,” he said.
From where I sat in the cab, it was evident that he had proven them wrong. Square-edged rows covered tightly in white plastic stretched off to a distant cane windbreak. It was mid-October, still early in the growing season, and deep green tomato plants stood knee-high at three-foot intervals above the plastic. In the distance, a tractor crept along a row towing a sprayer behind it that filled the air with white mist. In another corner of the field, a group of Hispanic men were bent over the young plants. To me, Beddard’s fields looked exactly like those of Ag-Mart, Six L’s, Pacific Tomato Growers, or any other large conventional grower. But Beddard assured me that appearances were deceiving. That tractor was spraying Bacillus thuringiensis, a popular organic insecticide that is made from bacteria that are naturally present in the soil. The workers were wielding squeegees that had been soaked in common household vinegar to kill or slow the growth of weeds.
His biggest challenge in Florida, he said is getting nutrients into the sandy soil. “It has no fertility at all,” he said. “And growing full-size slicing tomatoes is particularly hard because they have to stay in the ground for such a long time that they can use up all the nutrients we’ve worked in before they ripen.” Beddard spreads spent compost from mushroom farms over his land before crops go in. When they are harvested, he plants his fields in cover crops of sorghum and cowpeas, which add nitrogen and also help ward off the nematodes that conventional growers kill with toxic fumigants like methyl bromide and methyl iodide. He pointed to a field that was ready to be prepared for planting. It looked like a stubbly hayfield that had been cut but not baled. “The cover crops were hip high before we mowed it,” he said. “There’s a huge amount of organic matter there.” Conventional farmers allow their fields to grow up in weeds during the off season, which they then kill with herbicides. Beddard simply disks his cover crops into the soil. And where a conventional farmer would grow tomatoes in the same field year after year, Beddard practices crop rotation—tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, salad greens. He says that his yields are lower than his chemically dependent colleagues, sometimes significantly, but he more than recoups the differences in yields through the higher prices he can command for organic produce. “I go down there to Immokalee and I envy those guys with their plants just hanging with tomatoes,” he said. “But I probably make more than they do per acre.”
Beddard, who is fifty-five years old, grew up a city boy in Pittsburgh. His parents were shocked when at age sixteen he announced that he wanted to become a farmer, but they allowed him to study horticulture at Delaware Valley College in southwestern Pennsylvania. In those days, the school not only did not teach organic farming techniques, it actively frowned on them. But even as an inexperienced student, Beddard thought that there was something viscerally wrong with using poisonous chemicals to grow food we would eventually put in our mouths. “I was viewed as a renegade with a hippie philosophy,” he said.
Upon graduation, Beddard discovered that there wasn’t any job he could get with his horticulture degree, aside from going into agribusiness or selling agricultural chemicals, so in 1988 he and his wife, Chris (who died in a car accident in 2004), bought twenty acres in Pennsylvania, five of which were tillable. Over the next ten years, Lady Moon grew steadily, selling first to local health food stores and eventually to larger supermarket accounts. The Beddards purchased more land as business increased and expanded from a two-person organization that dragooned the Beddards three children during peak periods to one that now employs 150 workers year-round. “I was fortunate that I hit the organic scene just as it was starting to take off,” said Beddard.
By the late 1990s, the Beddards had what seemed like an ideal agrarian situation. Although they worked long hours throughout the spring, summer, and fall, they were making a decent living and they had the entire winter off. When Beddard suggested that they buy some land in Florida to offset the risk from having all their crops on one farm, his wife wisecracked, “Yeah, and then we can work 365 days a year.”
Despite the dire predictions of experienced Florida growers, Beddard had a bountiful harvest his first season in the South. He felt smug until he read in Packer magazine, a trade publication for the vegetable industry, that growing conditions in Florida that winter were the best they had been in a century. Then a few years later, a single storm, Hurricane Jeanne, damaged his Florida fields, and then moved up the coast, hitting his farms in Georgia, before drowning out what remained in his Pennsylvania fields.
In 2008 his buyer from Whole Foods Market came to Beddard and said that the natural grocery chain intended to sign the Coalition of Immokalee Workers fair food agreement. They wanted to know if he would be willing to pay harvesters an extra penny per pound and comply with the coalition’s other terms. That request presented him with a problem. As a matter of policy, Beddard pays hourly wages—there is no antiquated per-pound piece work at Lady Moon. In addition, he provides free housing for his workers when they move north to Georgia and Pennsylvania for the summer. (They are responsible for their own accommodations in Florida, where they live for most of the year with their families.) He consulted his accountants and discovered that he was already in compliance by a comfortable margin with the demands of the Campaign for Fair Food. He laughed, shaking his head. “I mean, come on, we’re talking about a penny per pound. What’s a penny a pound to these big producers? What’s it to me? Nothing. It made no sense to me why they fought so hard and in doing so gave the coalition all the ammo they could have ever asked for. I told one of them, ‘Give them the damn penny per pound and they’ll be off your back.’”
We arrived back at his packinghouse, where Beddard carried on a conversation about laying some irrigation lines for a new field with his field foreman, a slight, mustachioed Latino whose features were hidden in the deep shade provided by the brim of his straw cowboy hat. As I turned to leave, he told me, “Organic farming in Florida can be a bitch,” he said. “But it can be done.”
In 1976 two classmates who had just graduated cum laude from liberal arts programs at Harvard College decided to have one last summer lark together before immersing themselves in the grind of three years at Harvard Law School. A professor of theirs needed someone to drive his car out West, where he had accepted a new position, and the two buddies volunteered. Today, one of those recent graduates, Gregory S. Schell, is a lawyer with the Migrant Farmworker Justice Project of Florida Legal Services, a nonprofit group that offers pro bono representation to agricultural laborers in disputes with the farms that employ them. His friend, John G. Roberts, is now Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. “But he was a Democrat back then,” Schell informed me. “It was before he drank the Kool-Aid.”
Schell chose a radically different path. It’s hard to know where he would be practicing today if a Harvard alumnus hadn’t come to campus to talk about the legal work he was doing on behalf of migrants in Immokalee. “It sounded a lot like the Peace Corps, except right here in the United States,” Schell said. “I thought, ‘This will be fun.’”
Arriving for what he pictured as a short stint, Schell was surprised to find himself in the company of some top-notch legal talent. “They had gotten into this work and found it very challenging and rewarding,” he said. “And you don’t have to wear a tie. That’s really important.” Over the ensuing years, in addition to notching up a string of courtroom victories, he learned to speak fluent Haitian Creole and married a farmworker, whom he met in Immokalee while he was suing the organization that employed her. Schell may be the only Harvard Law grad whose mother-in-law ran a tomato labor camp until her dying day at age ninety-six. And he rarely puts on a tie.
During his three-decade career as a legal advocate, Schell, with financial backing from the Florida Bar Foundation, has won a series of precedent-setting cases that have changed agricultural labor policies across the country. It was Schell’s lawsuit that established that growers are liable for violations of labor laws that occur on their farms, even if the immediate perpetrator was a second-party crew boss. The decision established that the farm operator is responsible for making sure that anyone working on his farm, including those employed by subcontractors, gets at least the minimum wage. Owners, not crew bosses, are liable if workers are transported in unsafe vehicles or housed in substandard structures. “We put an end to that contractor fiction,” Schell said. Unfortunately, in 2000, Congress enacted a law that all but exempts farm owners from violations of human trafficking laws perpetrated by labor contractors they hire.
Schell’s work also established that employers are legally responsible for paying for foreign guest workers’ travel expenses to and from their home countries. When farm owners threatened to have lawyers who represented workers arrested if they entered grower-owned labor camps, Schell sent in a sixty-four-year-old associate of his who was a grandmother, knowing they wouldn’t want to incur the negative publicity of having her being hauled away by police. Instead, the growers sued her for trespassing, and Schell, who is a fervent advocate of transparency, not only won the case, but prevailed in a counterclaim that required owners of labor camps to give unfettered access to legal representatives, members of the media, rights advocates, and pretty much anyone else with a legitimate reason to visit. In addition, Schell has won tens—perhaps hundreds—of millions of dollars in back pay for his impoverished clients.
Schell operates from offices on a side street in Lake Worth, a working-class city languishing in the glitzy shadows of its neighbors immediately to the north, West Palm Beach and Palm Beach. A man of slight stature, Schell peers out from behind a pair of owlish glasses. He could easily pass for an English lit professor. On the day I met him, he wore jeans and a faded short-sleeve madras shirt. Behind his desk, he was dwarfed by stacks and bundles of accordion files, manila envelopes, file folders, vertical files, FedEx shipping boxes, loose-leaf binders, notepads, and books. To offer me a seat, he had to bring in a chair and wedge it into a corner, the only unoccupied space. And when I asked if I could place my digital recorder on his desk, he said, “Sure. Just make sure it doesn’t fall into a crevasse.”
Schell talks fast and in a high-pitched voice. His words roll forth in complete paragraphs, although when he warms to a subject, he sometimes neglects to inhale and has to stop and suck in a breath before picking up at the point at which he ran out of air, giving the impression that in the business of making sure that migrant workers get their due, there is far too much work and far too little time. If the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is the crusading political wing of the effort to end farmworker abuse in Florida’s tomato fields, Schell is its enforcer. “I’m not an organizer,” he told me. “What we do is get people money. I just make sure these guys get the minimum wage.”
His most immediate problem the morning we met was that he had to disperse the almost $1 million he had just won in a courthouse-steps settlement with Ag-Mart Produce. “Sometimes it seems like all we do is sue Ag-Mart,” he explained. “But they are far from alone and far from the worst actor out there.” Schell had filed eight class action lawsuits against the company on behalf of workers who had claimed that they were paid less than the minimum wage because they had received no compensation for “waiting time,” the industry term for the intervals between when buses arrive at the fields and workers actually begin to pick and between when they stop work and the buses finally leave. Those intervals can amount to several hours per week. In Schell’s practical world view, the biggest obstacle standing between tomato harvesters and a fair wage is not an extra penny per pound, but the lack of enforcement of labor laws that are already on the books. “Our experience has been that for the time they are actually picking, most people make minimum wage. What creates the problem is the waiting time at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. It adds up. If you could eliminate waiting time, I’d say that you’d have maybe 5 or 10 percent of tomato workers having problems with minimum wage.”
Ag-Mart had vigorously denied any wrongdoing but settled nonetheless. Now it was June, and Schell was trying to track down more than one thousand current and former Ag-Mart workers and sign them up for their share of the settlement before an October deadline. His firm had hired an administrator whose full-time job was to find eligible workers, some of whom had already headed north for the season, some of whom were back home in Mexico. The goal was to reach fifteen hundred pickers. “They will get a check for as much as two thousand dollars,” said Schell. “Will it change their lives? No. But it’s real money.”
In addition to getting workers money that they have legally earned, Schell sees his lawsuits as an important deterrent to any farm owner who might want to cut corners when it comes to giving his workers their legal due. “A company takes a bus load of workers out there and lets them wait without paying them—who cares?” said Schell. “Well, once they’ve been successfully sued for a whole bunch of money, they care. We’re in the process of suing some of the other big growers for similar things. When we sue, we sue for a lot of money and hope it sends the message to people—to quote Santana, ‘To change your evil ways, baby.’” His work, he said, deals with matters that should be prosecuted by the U.S. Labor Department, but under Clinton and then Bush, there was very little enforcement. “That meant open season on farmworkers.”
Unfortunately, early signs reaching Schell’s office indicated that the adoption of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Code of Conduct would not eliminate the need for the sort of strong-armed tactics that Schell has shown himself so effective at providing. “Enforcement is going to be a big problem,” he said, saying that he was joining forces with a private legal firm to file suit against one of the big Fair Food signatories, who was breaking the law by not paying for waiting time and transporting workers in uninsured vehicles driven by unlicensed drivers.
Over the years, Schell has developed an approach to negotiation that, while effective, has not endeared him to corporate agriculture. “We give them one chance,” he said. “We say, ‘You can do this the easy way or the hard way. Here’s the easy way: It will cost you X dollars. The hard way, unfortunately, is war, and our backers have already agreed that whatever amount we need to spend, we can spend. We are going to sue you to oblivion.’”
Recognizing that farmworkers’ exposure to pesticides has not gotten the attention that such issues as wages and involuntary servitude have received, Schell began taking steps in 2009 to rectify that. The problem, he said, is that no one has made an organized, concerted effort to bring pesticide complaints before the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is charged with regulating the use of agricultural chemicals. Some farmworker advocates have called for the control to be wrested from the agriculture department and given to the health department. Working with Schell, the Farmworker Association of Florida filed a half-dozen formal complaints. “We want to see what the state does with them,” said Schell. “If they do a great job, terrific. If they do a crummy job, then we have the basis to go in and say that we need a new agency in charge. We are poorly positioned to critique them if we don’t give them enough rope to hang themselves. So we’re giving them ample rope.”
Schell’s battle to see that workers get their due is made all the harder, he said, because most of his would-be clients lack legal status in the United States. “You have a workforce that has no rights or perceives that it has no rights,” he said. Like many players in the tomato industry, Schell feels that giving migrant workers documentation would not only legitimize the illegal status of the majority of Florida agriculture’s workforce but reduce the migrants’ vulnerability to exploitation. “Until you resolve that issue, the potential for all sorts of human trafficking and other labor abuse is there. We feel that we’re sticking fingers in a dike and that we don’t have enough fingers. Until it’s resolved, it’s hard to see how things will dramatically improve. Even after it’s fixed, we’ll have plenty of problems.”
Before I left, I asked him whether he has any regrets when he looks at his Harvard Law School peers like Chief Justice Roberts or the multimillionaire rainmakers on Wall Street. He responded unhesitatingly, “I probably enjoy my work as much or more than any of them. I can’t believe they are paying me, I’m having so much fun. I mean, we get together here and say, ‘Let’s take a run at this constitutional case. Let’s try something creative that a private attorney couldn’t risk the money on.’ We have the chance to move the law forward, and sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it works often enough that it’s pretty cool. Plus, how could you not like this group of clients,” he continued. “All they want is to be paid what the law requires for their hard work. You don’t have to be a raving liberal to say that that is a pretty basic concept. And the system is stacked so heavily against them. I try to equalize the scales. That’s what I went to law school for—to give the little guy a shot. Our client in every case has been ripped off big time. The only question is who is going to pay. And in every case, we’re the only source of help. They come to us when there’s nowhere else to turn. I get to represent the best group of people imaginable.”
Barbara Mainster cracked open a door in a building behind the Redlands Christian Migrant Association’s head office in Immokalee, turned to me, and put her index finger to her lips. “Shhhhhhhh!” She led me into a darkened room. It was silent and the cool air inside provided welcome relief from the numbing humidity of an overcast autumn day. Even in the dim light, the room and all its furnishings abounded in reds, yellows, and blues. It was spotlessly clean. In a whisper, Mainster introduced me to two Hispanic women who both looked like they were in their late twenties or early thirties, Hilda Enriques, in a rocking chair, and Francesca Sota, who was stretched out on the floor. Both women cradled infants in their arms. One other baby slept in a crib. “We usually have eight babies in this room,” said Mainster, a gray-haired seventy-year-old grandmother. “The others have gone home for the day.” Enriques had been a caregiver at Redlands for five years; Soto for seven. Before that, both women had labored in the same fields where the mothers of the children in their arms were working at that very moment. “They have walked in the same shoes as the babies’ parents,” said Mainster.
And that is the key to the success of Mainster’s association, which provides free or low-cost child care and early education to the children of migrant farmworkers and other rural, low-income families. The organization began in 1965, when a group of Mennonite Church volunteers decided to provide daycare for the children of workers who lived in two migrant camps in Redlands, an agricultural district about twenty miles southwest of Miami. The goal was to keep the kids safe and out of the fields.
Initially, it seemed that the Mennonites’ plan was fated to be just another well-intentioned charitable effort that fizzled. The founders opened the centers, but no one came. The immigrant mothers were not comfortable leaving their tiny children with white Americans who spoke no Spanish or Haitian Creole and had little understanding of the parents’ cultures. Only when the association began hiring from the migrant community itself did the centers begin to fill.
Daycare for the children of immigrants provides a double-edged benefit. Kids who might otherwise be hauled out into the fields or warehoused by the dozen in filthy trailers supervised by the uneducated wife of a crew boss are given a clean, safe environment and acquire the basic skills necessary to enter the American school system. The women who care for them are able to leave the fields to work in comfortable, secure surroundings. They are encouraged to continue their education and earn living wages, creating pockets of upward mobility in the migrant communities.
When Mainster, who has been executive director since 1988, joined the association in 1972, it had three centers in one county, with an enrollment of seventy-five kids. Today, thanks to her single-minded drive, which has not diminished an iota over nearly four decades during which she raised four of her own children (three of them adopted), the association has more than eighty centers and charter schools in twenty-one counties. It serves eight thousand children, making it one of the largest nonprofit child-care programs in the United States, and employs fifteen hundred caregivers, most of them Latinas. Redlands kids get a hot breakfast, a hot lunch, and an afternoon snack and learn enough English to enter the American school system.
Mainster and I strolled into a shaded courtyard that houses three separate age-appropriate playgrounds with plastic tunnels, slides, tricycles, swings, a playhouse, and a pretend gas station and café, all painted in riotous primary colors. The space, located in the former Sunday school of a Baptist church, now provides care for 180 children. An additional 220 first- to sixth-grade students attend a charter school run by the association on an adjacent piece of property. “We want to keep them with us as long as possible,” said Mainster.
Mainster credits much of the success of Redlands to her philosophy that there are good people and bad people in every profession, including Florida agriculture. Mainster works closely with major growers—Michael Stuart, chief executive officer of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association, a trade group, was president of the Redlands board of directors. “Agriculture is a very important, well-connected force in this state, and they can lobby very effectively for funding and other things we need,” she said.
A sign in Mainster’s office reads “We don’t believe in miracles. We rely on them.” In truth government grants through programs such as Head Start and federal child care grants cover 85 percent of the association’s $56-million annual budget. Donations and charter school fees make up most of the rest, with only 2 percent coming from parent fees. Despite being called the Redlands Christian Migrant Association, the group is completely secular. “I don’t know why we stick with the name,” Mainster said. “We are no longer based in Redlands. We are not affiliated with any religion. We work with nonmigrants as well as migrants. And we are a nonprofit organization, not an association.”
Ultimately, Redlands’ goal, according to Mainster, is to level the playing field for the children under their care. A child of English-speaking native-born American parents has a vocabulary of about three thousand words at age three, she explained. The child of an uneducated, non–English speaking mother has only five hundred. Some Redlands students in the sixth grade, she said, have never been out of Immokalee, except on school field trips. “They start out at a huge disadvantage.”
A dozen years ago, a Guatemalan boy who came to one of their centers at about age two certainly faced more than his share of challenges. His mother was illiterate and spoke only her native Amerindian language and some fragmentary Spanish. The child was completely nonverbal. Mainster arranged for him to be tested for hearing loss and mental disabilities. He had none. Caregivers continued to work with him, and slowly he began to speak. By third grade, he was not only fluent in Spanish and English but was reading at levels deemed age-appropriate by the state. In sixth grade, he asked to speak to a guidance counselor and came into her office carrying a thick envelope from the Florida Board of Education written in English and aimed at educated American parents. Consulting a document, he said, “It says here that it’s time that I do a little career exploration.”
“This kid would have been considered gifted in an upper-middle-class school setting,” Mainster said. The boy is in high school now, and Mainster intends to make sure that Redlands gets him scholarship money and anything else he needs to attend college and, who knows, maybe get a fair shot at the piece of the American dream denied to his parents.
Hurricane Andrew made landfall near Homestead, Florida, at about five o’clock in the morning on August 24, 1992. The powerful storm’s 150-mile-per hour winds ripped into the coastal area just south of Miami, slamming into a dilapidated, county-owned trailer park that for two decades had served as a “temporary” labor camp for the migrants who picked citrus, tomatoes, and other crops grown in Dade County’s gravely soil. Miraculously, no one who lived in the park was injured. At that time of year, most migrant workers are in northern states. However, all but two of the four hundred trailers were demolished, reduced to heaps of splintered two-by-fours, twisted aluminum siding, and ripped-apart furniture. Andrew left the 154 families who lived in the camp at the time homeless. That hurricane turned out to be one of the best things ever to happen to Florida’s farmworkers.
In the aftermath of Andrew, South Florida found itself awash in offers of federal disaster relief funding. Farmers desperately needed shelter for the workers that would soon be arriving to pick the winter’s harvest. The board of the Everglades Community Association, which managed worker housing in the county, hired Steven Kirk to oversee reconstruction. It was a classic case of the right person for the right job. Kirk, who had studied public policy at Duke University, became a passionate advocate for farmworker justice after spending a summer in the mid 1970s interviewing vegetable pickers in North Carolina under the supervision of the oral historian and author Robert Coles. One day he stumbled across a couple of African American men running down an unpaved road. They told him that their boss had tied them to a tree to prevent their escaping. Kirk rented them rooms in a motel until authorities came.
Kirk spent the early part of his career knocking around Washington, DC, working for various farm laborers’ groups and other antipoverty organizations, gaining insight into how to manipulate levers of power and loosen purse strings in the nation’s capital. Upon arriving in Florida, he saw two courses of action for the Everglades Community Association. They could simply replicate the ugly, crime-ridden old camp by acquiring a few hundred replacement trailers and slapping them down in straight barrackslike rows on cement pads, or they could do something no one else had attempted: build a functioning farmworkers’ community.
Today, Everglades Farmworker Village, as the one hundred and twenty acre development that sprang up on the ground occupied by that old trailer park is called, is one of the country’s largest farmworker housing projects. In one of the electric golf carts that provide the primary mode of transportation for village maintenance people and other employees, Kirk gave me a tour. Short, wearing jeans, with mussed, thinning hair, Kirk is in his mid-fifties. As we purred through a pleasant network of curving streets bordered by palm trees, he told me that the community is home to nearly two thousand mostly Hispanic workers whose average family income is between $16,000 and $18,000. The 493 housing units, pastel stucco over cement block, are either stand-alone single-family structures, side-by-side duplexes, or two-story townhouses. A couple of dormitory-style buildings provide accommodations for 144 single men. The streets have curbs and gutters, and the landscaping is immaculate. The community has its own ten-acre park and soccer fields. A small grocery store, a branch of a larger Hispanic supermarket in Homestead, provides a wide range of traditional products at reasonable prices. A Community Development Credit Union maintains an office here, and workers can get fairly priced loans, open bank accounts, and make other financial transactions so they are not gouged by check-cashing companies and costly wire transfers.
Kirk made a deal with Mainster’s Redlands organization to run three day care centers at Everglades serving three hundred preschoolers. An additional 250 older kids participate in organized after-school activities. The community has a space for religious services, a community hall for wedding receptions and quinceañeras (celebrations of a Latina girl’s fifteenth birthday), a computer lab, two self-service laundries, and a health clinic. “There are a lot of people involved with low-income housing whose attitude is, they are just going to tear the places apart, why make them nice,” Kirk said. He takes the opposite view, believing that if you have high expectations of tenants and give them quality accommodations, they will respect them. “And that has proved to be true,” he said.
In the world of migrant housing, the lowest of the low are single men. They are typically the ones relegated to sleeping ten or twelve to a trailer in places like Immokalee—if they have any place to stay at all. The backcountry of Florida is pocked with makeshift encampments of single workers who cannot find shelter. Even farmworkers with families shun their single brethren, associating them with loud music, drunken rowdiness, and unwanted interest in teenage daughters. But Kirk was determined to make a place for single men in Everglades Farmworker Village.
He stopped the golf cart and opened a gate that led into a shady courtyard surrounded by a U-shaped building whose facade was regularly interrupted by doors, giving the effect of a motel that had turned inward on itself. Gazebos and clusters of benches, chairs, and tables filled the courtyard. The principle, Kirk said, was to provide the men with a space to mingle and socialize outdoors that would also contain their activities and provide a measure of control over who entered the compound. Kirk opened the door to a unit, exposing us to a puff of air-conditioned air. The living room consisted of a heavy wooden table with benches set on a spotless linoleum floor. Off that room was a kitchen with a stove and two refrigerators. “Eight guys share this space, we want them to have room to store their food,” Kirk explained. Four bedrooms extended off the main living area, each with two built-in twin beds. Toilets and showers were in separate rooms.
The quarters reminded me of the on-campus apartment where my college-age daughter lived with four friends, only the workers’ was more spacious and cleaner. At $175 per person a month including all utilities, the bachelor accommodations were a steal compared to the trailers I’d seen in Immokalee. And no one complained about the single guys. “We get more complaints about teenaged kids of married couples,” Kirk said.
When designing the village, Kirk sat down with prospective residents and asked them what features they wanted to see in their dwellings. Women wanted to have hook-ups for washers and dryers, plenty of storage space, and large kitchen windows so they could keep an eye on their kids playing in the yard while they prepared meals. Men wanted parking places installed tight up in front of the houses to deter anyone who might want to vandalize or steal their vehicles—in many cases the only asset the family possessed. Everyone wanted to save money on electricity bills, so houses included fans in every room and specially designed windows to ventilate homes, limiting the need to run expensive air conditioners. A gated entrance and night-time security were also on the workers’ wish list.
In return, Kirk and the board, which included residents, had a few demands of their own. “We practice tough love,” he said. Some might say it’s paternalistic or downright authoritarian. But it works, Kirk insists. Quiet must prevail after 11:00 in the evening. Single men can have no overnight guests. Vehicles must be parked in designated places. No pets are allowed. No do-it-yourself paint jobs or landscaping projects are permitted. There are no clotheslines, a rule Kirk explained by saying that aesthetics are as important as any other issue to maintaining a sense of pride in the community. The final rule is you have to pay your rent, which is capped at one-third of a family’s income. Government subsidies make up the rest, if necessary. “We don’t evict people who are unable to pay. We evict them for refusal to pay,” said Kirk. “If rent is affordable to people, it becomes a priority for them.”
Early on, Kirk faced some competition for funding from farmers who wanted to build housing for their workers on their own land. Recalling incidents of being run off property by county sheriffs back in his student days when he was trying to interview the children of North Carolina farmworkers, Kirk adamantly opposed employer-built housing. “I don’t want them in control,” he said. “If you live down some dirt road where there’s an armed security guard to keep people out, problems can develop. Here, if Greg Schell’s paralegal wants to come down and meet with you, there’s an office set aside. The opportunity for involuntary servitude in this community is pretty slim. There is always someone to reach out to.”
In the 1990s, Kirk, a self-professed workaholic, spent many nights at his desk until ten o’clock at night, a muted TV in one corner of his office tuned to CNN providing a link to the outside world. Equal parts zealous missionary for the oppressed and hard-driving real estate tycoon, Kirk had no family, few outside interests, and a very neglected girlfriend. His $50-million project was up and running. The creative, challenging part had been successfully completed, and suddenly Kirk found himself growing antsy. He went to his board of directors, which consisted entirely of local people whose interests were focused on county politics, and spelled the situation out. It was fine with him if they just wanted to run Everglades Farmworker Village. “I told them, if that’s the case, you need a property manager.” That job was not intellectually challenging enough for him. On the other hand, he said, the group could take what they had learned in building the village and try to spread affordable housing to farmworkers statewide. “The situation is very, very bad upstate,” he explained, saying that if they wanted to expand, he was their man. They told him that they were prepared to take the next steps.
Over the ensuing decade, an umbrella organization called Rural Neighborhoods, with Kirk as its president, built developments in Immokalee, LaBelle, and Okeechobee in the southern part of the state, in Winter Haven in the center, in Ruskin in the west, and Fort Pierce in the east. With low-interest loans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and through the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit that encourages private investors to make equity investments in affordable housing projects, Rural Neighborhoods spent more than $200 million to build thirteen hundred units that house more than forty-five hundred tenants, mostly farmworkers. It was an astonishing accomplishment. Kirk credits his knowledge of how governmental agencies work and his acumen about what politicians and officials need for his ability to get his projects funded. A conservative governor taking heat for working conditions in Florida fields might be eager to allot housing funding to migrant housing as a goodwill gesture. “We let them co-opt us; and we co-opt them,” said Kirk.
Other affordable housing advocates have criticized Kirk for the high quality of his housing. “Why spend $100,000 per unit for architect-designed cement block and stucco structures when you can get a manufactured home for $60,000?” they complain. Kirk is utterly unrepentant. Rural Neighborhoods has built the best apartments available, period, in places like Immokalee, LaBelle, and Okeechobee, he said. “We’ve changed the perception of farmworker housing. I would be happy to live in any of our developments.”
There is also an element of canniness in building attractive communities that look nothing like stereotypical farmworker housing. Given their propensity for being blasted into kindling with each passing hurricane, manufactured homes (glorified trailers, in the view of many) have an unsavory reputation in Florida. “Yeah, maybe we could house more people for less money in the short run,” said Kirk. “But the political reality is that quality housing sells better to local lawmakers.” It is also a financial as well as a political reality. If a lender ever had to foreclose on a Rural Neighborhoods’ property, he could sell it to a landlord who could fill it with eager renters, not marginalized farmworkers, which makes it more likely that a bank will extend credit to Kirk.
Unlike most heads of charitable organizations, Kirk lives with the possibility of bankruptcy. Rural Neighborhoods may borrow at low interest rates through government programs, but the money it invests has to be paid back like any mortgage. Rents in its developments are set at a level that allows Rural Neighborhoods to break even, but higher than expected vacancy rates can quickly turn break-even budgeting into a losing proposition. “We are a risk-taking organization,” Kirk said. “We are doing multimillion-dollar deals. We guarantee loans. We could fail. But my view is that Bob Dylan thing, ‘He not busy being born is busy dying.’”
Just prior to my visiting him in 2010, Kirk did something completely out of character: He took off three days in a row. On the previous weekend, the fifty-five-year-old lifelong bachelor had gotten married for the first time. But having entered into that state hadn’t done much to lessen his pace. He had 281 new units—$35 million worth—under various stages of construction and scheduled for occupancy within a year, all of which had to be paid for. The recession was making it tough even for providers of homes for the lowest of the low. Plus, Kirk was concerned that the immigration crackdown and resulting fear among migrants might suddenly leave him with unexpected vacancy rates. But none of those worries were slowing him down. “There’s need out there,” he said. “And if no one else is going to fill it, I have to step into the void.” He shrugged philosophically and added, “And even if we fail, those new units will still be there.”
If Kirk is wistful about anything after three decades as a farmworkers’ advocate, it’s that there’s still a need for people like him. “We set out trying to change agriculture,” he said. “People like Barbara Mainster and I have changed conditions for some workers, but we haven’t changed agriculture.”