Every morning Jorge Valdés used to take his morning laundry at the little window of Carreta on 40th Street in Miami. A habit of several decades that also allowed him to take a morning walk with Lobo, his little dachshund.
Everything was routine and normal during the last decades. But two weeks ago the man got a surprise. After depositing a dollar bill on the counter, the clerk called him and told him another dollar was missing because laundry now cost two dollars plus 7% local tax. Valdés was outraged, as he would explain days later to OnCuba. “An increase of 100%, where have you seen this?” She complained.
He wasn’t the only one. The increase in laundry and coffee per unit rose a little throughout the Miami metropolitan area, as the Miami.com site warned in a short report earlier this week.
“The average price of a colada at twenty of Miami-Dade’s most popular little windows, from Homestead to Hialeah, is now $2.06, double what it cost at many Cuban coffee windows like Sergio’s Cuban restaurant in 2019. The cheapest among them is a tie between The Palace of Juices on Flagler Street and Hialeah’s Epicenter, where it’s now $1.50. The tallest? Molina’s Ranch of Hialeah charges $4.05, a price worthy of the Starbucks chain,” the site wrote.
It is true that until now the price of laundry has never been uniform. In Miami Beach it was always about $2.50. But in the generality of the small windows, things were for a dollar, especially in Little Havana, where most of the consumers are at all hours. A Versailles restaurant employee once told me that they used to brew an average of 40 kilos of coffee a day.
In the Versailles laundry cost some time ago more than a dollar. But never the $1.75 now. According to the owner, Felipe Valls Jr, »“with a laundry for a dollar you lose money».
Valls presides over a small empire. He owns Versailles and several restaurants: La Carreta, La Palma and Casa Cuba, and to meet coffee orders he imports the beans he roasts in Miami, and sells them in the windows and packed in supermarkets and other establishments such as the two windows at the city airport, here for two dollars, and explained to Miami.com what is happening.
The small windows are spaces facing the street, outside the restaurants, where customers are served standing up, and where, in addition to coffee, croquettes, pastries and cigars, among others, are sold.
The problem arises, he explains, in a very concrete fact: the increase in the price of grain, which without roasting rose from a dollar a pound to a maximum of $2.10 a pound last year. This means that the cost of roasted coffee beans could have risen from $5 to $6.50 per pound.
Valls used to protect himself against price fluctuations by contracting with producers a fixed price that was maintained for several months, but they were never very fond of this formula. Labor and transportation costs often fluctuate, in part because of rising fuel prices.
In the last year, the price of gasoline has skyrocketed around the world, and Miami is no exception. On a tour of the city, it is found that in most gas stations fuel is above $4.25 a gallon, with the exception of Miami Beach, where it is already over $6. But that has always been the most expensive place. Wealthy residents and tourists are the cause. And also the high local and state taxes.
But if the price of laundry can have a psychological effect on the lower social classes, retirees and service workers, the price of gasoline are big words.
An increase in gasoline is reflected in an infinity of things and has created a chain of increases. For example, in food. There are supermarkets in Miami that are selling the lemons at 2 for 1 dollar; a bunch of four or five bananas costs more than five dollars; I have seen cucumbers at $1.29 per unit; The pound of meat does not go below 8 dollars —and it does not have to be first class. A gallon of milk rose to $5.34, up just over 30%.
In general, the price of errands in Miami is above Florida average. If in Miami errands cost an average of $107.3 per week, in the state they do not exceed $102.8 and in the country they are reduced to $100.
«Now it is mandatory to wait for the exit [semanal] of brochures to buy with discount prices. There is no other way”, explained a domestic worker who earns an average of 60 dollars for each house she cleans – and she cleans two a day. And it is served in addition to the only two supermarket chains that are still the cheapest although they are not as varied as the others, more expensive.
To keep products cheap, they have had to cut employee wages and replace, for example, cashiers with automated machines: the customer scans the products and then pays with a credit card or cash. As he explains, it is not only the increase in prices but the increase in the unemployed.
“The increase in gasoline has become, after food and house rent, the third largest expense of a family aggregate with an average, for example, of two cars,” explains lawyer Jorge Manuel Álvarez.
The reason is that Miami is the largest metropolitan area in the United States where public transport service is practically non-existent. Its biggest clients are the lower classes without the possibility of access to a car, even an old one, which here is called a transportation.
The increase in prices has also been reflected in housing, both in rentals and in sales. In today’s rents you can’t get a two-bedroom apartment for less than $1,700 in the suburbs for more than $2,000 in the city, in part because of real estate speculation created by the fact that over the past two decades Many people, especially from Latin American countries, have invested in Miami to run investment apartments.
All expenses are passed on to the renter, from the annual municipal tax on the value of the home, which is guided by the average value of the properties in the area where it is inserted, to the increase in the cost of maintenance services for the condominium.
In Hammocks, a middle-class area, the cost of living already reaches 400 dollars a month. A little to the north it can be half, but the services have a little less quality. The definition of these costs is carried out by the condominium boards without the approval of the resident owners, who barely have a say in the annual budget.
This brings difficult consequences. As has been pointed out by miami heraldthe increases are not parallel to the increase in wages, which reinforce the price crisis in the area.
“A worker in the Miami metropolitan area, which includes Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, earns an average of $40,000 a year before taxes. If the value of his house rose to 72,053, it means that his house valued 3,205 above the average salary, according to a recent study by the portal of real estate zillow“said the newspaper.
This tendency for real estate earnings to be greater than the average income of its residents occurred in 25 of the 38 metropolitan areas in the country included in the Zillow study. In eleven of these cities, housing increased its value on average by 100,000.
To the same extent that property values have risen, the situation has become more complicated for renters, who in the case of Miami experienced an increase of $7,104 in annual rent in 2021, according to Zillow.
Miami is the third most expensive market to rent in the country. Now rents are higher than in Boston, San Diego, San Jose and Los Angeles. The rents in Miami are only exceeded by those paid in New York (3,420) and San Francisco (2,900), indicated another study, in this case from the real estate portal Zumper.
