Food pantry feeds 250 people a day in Liberty City. Why are police shutting it down?

Crates, boxes and refrigerators lined Northwest Seventh Avenue near 54th Street Monday as Miami-Dade police evicted a Liberty City food pantry that had become a cornerstone of the community.

Around 8 a.m., as volunteers at the Village FREEdge were preparing food and people were lining up outside on Seventh Avenue for their morning meal, police arrived with a locksmith and representatives from the landlord, Gator Investments, to change the locks.

Patricia Mack, 64, the volunteer who runs the pantry’s sandwich station, put down her slices of bread, ham and cheese. The volunteers shut off the gospel and R&B music oozing through the speakers in the pantry’s kitchen. Outside, shouts erupted as volunteers and local residents confronted the cops.

The Village FREEdge, started in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, quickly became a lifeline for many in Liberty City. The pantry feeds 250 people each day and — up until Feb. 15 — an adjoining clinic staffed by volunteer doctors offered free healthcare.

Case workers from the nonprofit Dade County Street Response Team, who worked at the clinic, helped people set up medical appointments, navigate government bureaucracy to request key documents like birth certificates and Social Security cards and get bus passes to get around town.

But all that was thrown into disarray when the pantry and the clinic had a dispute with their landlord that ended in a court-ordered eviction. Police evicted the health clinic on Feb. 15, but through a clerical error, didn’t have the right paperwork to evict the pantry. They returned to evict the pantry Monday.

Now, the pantry’s future is in doubt. Sherina Jones, 38, who started and runs the volunteer-staffed pantry, says she hasn’t found another location to operate from in the long run. “I don’t want to feel like I let this community down that I got to know name by name, child by child, situation by situation,” she said. “Do I quit or keep going? That’s the question I keep asking myself.”

The health clinic is now operating out of a shipping container in a temporary location at a Dream Defenders office nearby. It’s unclear if the clinic and the pantry will operate side by side again.

“People consider this a lifeline,” said Armen Henderson, a University of Miami internal medicine doctor who founded the clinic, a few days before the clinic was evicted in February. “They know they can come here and get food and see a doctor without having to wait months.”

“If we had to move to another place, we’d be cutting off people’s lifeline,” he said.

The building’s landlord, Gator Investments, owns 221 properties in 22 states, including the commercial property at 5507 NW Seventh Ave. that housed the pantry and the clinic. The dispute centered around the tenants’ decision to withhold rent.

Jones and Henderson said the building was in disrepair and the roof was collapsing. Jones said the roof had multiple leaks, including one above an electrical panel. The city of Miami posted an unsafe structure notice on the building on Jan. 6.

Henderson claims he spent $50,000 of his own money on roof repairs. Henderson and Jones say they stopped paying rent in June because Gator Investments wasn’t making necessary repairs.

James Goldsmith, CEO of Gator Investments, disputes this version of events. He agrees there were issues with the roof, but claims that Gator fixed them. “It’s them that created the problem because they don’t pay rent,” Goldsmith said.

There were still visible holes in the ceiling when the police came to evict the pantry on March 6.

Pantry volunteers temporarily moved some of their refrigerators and food down the street to the building that houses the Roots Collective Monday morning. Jones says she isn’t sure if the pantry will be able to operate there.

“I don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” she said. “I’m still figuring it out.”

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