Tourist mecca squeezes the middle

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile • E-mail

SWEETWATER, Fla. - Olga Suarez is a construction project manager, not a social scientist, but she sees three socioeconomic classes in the Miami area: “You’re either rich or you’re poor or you’re screwed.”

Suarez, a 35-year-old single mother, says she’s in that third category despite a $71,000-plus annual income that places her squarely in the U.S. middle class in the eyes of most economists and far above the Miami-Dade metro area median family income of $45,200.

But by the time she pays her rent, car loan, utilities, insurance and puts a little food on the table and gas in the tank, she’s in the red or very close to it every month.

“I work in a guy’s industry and by all standards I should be OK, making what I make,” she says. “Where is it? The numbers just don’t add up.”

Her income includes her salary and child support for her youngest son from her second marriage, 4-year-old Ryan. The family also receives Social Security survivor benefits for eldest son Kevin, 15, and daughter Annya, 12, whose father, Suarez’s first husband, died last year.

She says the key factor in her financial struggle is her determination to raise her kids in a safe place and keep them in schools where they can associate with high academic achievers.

On the first account, the family has settled into a three-bedroom, pink stucco duplex in Sweetwater, nestled in Miami’s steamy, crowded suburbs near Florida’s Turnpike and Highway 836. The $1,650 a month rent is steeper than other places she might live, and seemingly unwarranted by the concrete, asphalt and chain-link motif of the neighborhood.

But Sweetwater, with a population of about 15,000, has a crime rate that’s less than half the national average. “The cops in this town are bored,” Suarez says.

On the second account, she says she pleaded with administrators to keep her kids at the public schools they attended before she split with Ryan’s father earlier this year, forcing her to move. While she’s delighted she was able to do that, she must now pay about $150 a month in private bus fare for the older kids.

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