Miami mayoral candidate Emilio Gonzalez warned voters that his opponent, Commissioner Eileen Higgins, would create a "city of renters" due to overdevelopment and lead the city into a pit of unaffordability if elected mayor during a recent interview on Fox & Friends Weekend.
"Basically, you start overbuilding and anywhere and everywhere you find a patch of land, you just have developers put something up, and before you know it, we're going to be hopscotched all over the place with tall buildings in the middle of neighborhoods," Gonzalez said.
Instead, Gonzalez countered that Miami needed to be a "city of owners."
"My plan is for people to own their homes, not necessarily rent an apartment somewhere," Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez, who's running against Higgins in a runoff election on Tuesday, also attributed Miami's affordability problem to it being overtaxed. In October, Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, who has audited cities and counties for excessive spending, uncovered that the City of Miami wasted $94 million during his review.
To further make it affordable, Gonzalez indicated he supported Gov. Ron DeSantis's plan to eliminate homestead property taxes. The governor also detailed his plan to eliminate property taxes on personal homes in an exclusive interview with The Floridian last week.
"It makes up a very small percent of the city budget, and it's something that's affordable, and we put money in people's pockets," Gonzalez said. "We want people to own their homes to stay in their homes. Right now, our affordability crisis is to the point where people are being property taxed out of their homes."
Gonzalez faces Higgins in a runoff election on Tuesday after neither candidate received over 50% of the vote in last month's general election. In that election, Gonzalez collected 19% of the vote while Higgins earned 36% in a 13-person field.
Will the results change in the runoff election?
Gonzalez thinks so, predicting the rest of Miami voters will coalesce behind his common-sense approach to city government and propel him to victory a second time around.
"Once we come down to the final two, all the voters are coalescing," Gonzalez said. "People understand what's at stake here. This isn't just some ho-hum municipal election. This is big."
While the race for mayor is technically nonpartisan, Gonzalez, a registered Republican, is banking on Higgins' progressive views as being too much for Miamians to support. Higgins is a registered Democrat.
If not, Miami could verge in the direction of New York City, where another progressive and self-described socialist, Zohran Mamdani, emerged victorious in its election last month.
"You know, Democratic Party progressives have tried and succeeded in going after a lot of big cities throughout the United States," Gonzalez continued. "They can't win at the national level. They can only win at the state level in some areas, and now they're going for cities, and we're not going to allow that here in Miami."
