Thirty-Year Retrospective: The Status of the Black Community in Miami-Dade County

The Black "Brain Drain": Black Professionals Leaving Miami-Dade County

The Metro Miami Action Plan (MMAP) is an agency of Miami-Dade County government "committed to addressing the socio-economic disparity of Miami-Dade County's Black community by advocating and coordinating initiatives and programs for the benefit of the community-at-large." The report also made recommendations to overcome the disparities ineconomics, jobs, education, housing, and criminal justice. This baseline analysis was updated in 1993and these baseline indices were revisited in 2006-2007 when MMAP retained the consulting services of the Metropolitan Center at Florida International University (FIU) to prepare and complete an Assessment of the Black Community with the goal to examine and update these indices in order to determine the existing disparities within Miami-Dade County's Black communities.

Disparity, which we define as the occurrence of a large spread or significant difference between the group and overall population, was measured at the County level with a focus on four Commission Districts, 1, 2, 3, and 9, which have a significant concentration of Black population. The data collected for this study provides a "snapshot" of the local conditions based on an analysis of factors such as economic development, including employment, income and housing; education; criminal justice; and healthcare.

The 2007 report, whenever possible, showed trends comparing indices in 1983, 1983, and the latest available data. The Metropolitan Center's report employed several methods of gathering data to provide a comparative analysis of disparity between 1983 and the present. The Metropolitan Center began its conducted a demographic analysis utilizing countywide data, US Census figures, and additional data from the Agency for Workforce Innovation, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and various other resources that provide population data. The research team classified data by standard demographic variables including race, age, and gender. In addition, standard socio-economic variables such as educational attainment, income, and poverty levels were used to show disparity between predominantly Black communities from other race populations in Miami-Dade County.

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