For two decades, Orlando Capote has struggled with developers and the South Florida city of Coral Gables to protect the home his parents bought more than 35 years ago.
Saul Martinez for NPR
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Saul Martinez for NPR
For two decades, Orlando Capote has struggled with developers and the South Florida city of Coral Gables to protect the home his parents bought more than 35 years ago.
Saul Martinez for NPR
There’s something unusual about a new real estate development in the posh South Florida city of Coral Gables. Smack-dab in the middle of the million-square-foot complex, there’s a small house. On all sides, it’s surrounded — by parking garages, office buildings and a 14-story hotel.
Orlando Capote’s home is typical of many in Coral Gables. It’s a Mediterranean-style, one-story, two-bedroom stucco house with a picturesque barrel-tile roof. There used to be many homes like it in his neighborhood. Now, his is the last one left.
“Just imagine … that your house was in the middle of Manhattan surrounded by high-rise buildings,” Capote says. “That’s what it’s like.”
Surrounded by shadows, piles of debris, big-ticket fines
For most of the year, his home is in shadows. Some of his trees and bushes are dying. His mango tree stopped giving fruit.
Just getting to Capote’s house requires special directions, taking you down one-way streets in the retail and residential complex to an unmarked alley that ends at his backyard. There are piles of yard debris that he can’t get the city to pick up, he says.
In his front yard, directly across the street from his home, cars and buses idle outside the big, new Loews hotel. Large planters have been installed in front of his house in what seems to be an effort to hide it from hotel guests.
Orlando Capote’s small home is in the middle of a million-square-foot complex, surrounded on all sides by parking garages, office buildings and a 14-story hotel.
Saul Martinez for NPR
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Saul Martinez for NPR
Orlando Capote’s small home is in the middle of a million-square-foot complex, surrounded on all sides by parking garages, office buildings and a 14-story hotel.
Saul Martinez for NPR
For months, he’s been negotiating with the city over a series of code violations, involving everything from overgrown grass to feral cats. At one point, he says, the fines totaled nearly $30,000.
Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago says that’s no longer the case. When it was mistakenly reported that the city had placed a lien on Capote’s property, he says city offices were overwhelmed by a flood of emails and phone calls. “We were very clear at the last commission meeting to state that we had not continued to move forward in regards to any citations or any liens in regards to code enforcement,” the mayor says.
How this tiny house became surrounded
Capote is 68 years old, a professional engineer who’s become well-versed in planning and zoning law. For two decades, he’s been engaged in a struggle against developers, the city and what used to be called “progress.” He came to Miami from Cuba with his parents as a teenager, and in 1989, they bought the home in Coral Gables.
In 2004, at the height of a real estate boom, a developer began buying up houses in the neighborhood to make way for a new project, according to Capote. “But at that time, my father was very ill and we had to take care of him,” he says. “And there was no way that I could look after my father, sell the house and go find another house.”
Shortly afterward, Florida’s real estate bubble burst and the developer went bankrupt. The other homes in Capote’s neighborhood were demolished, and for a decade, not much happened.
Eventually, another…
Read More: Florida man who wouldn’t sell lives in big buildings’ shadows : NPR