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A Florida man who refused to sell his home to a developer now lives in the shadows
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 developer, Agave Holdings, acquired the land and started moving ahead with a new, more ambitious project. In 2013, Capote says, employees of the developer came to his house and tried to get him to sign a document. When he read it, he says, he became angry. “The wording implied that we were going to sell them the property. And they could represent us in the permitting process for the project,” Capote says.
For most of the year, Orlando Capote’s home is in shadows. Some of his trees and bushes are dying, and his mango tree stopped giving fruit.
Saul Martinez for NPR
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Saul Martinez for NPR
For most of the year, Orlando Capote’s home is in shadows. Some of his trees and bushes are dying, and his mango tree stopped giving fruit.
Saul Martinez for NPR
He says he threw the papers at Agave’s representatives and told them not to come back. Later, another employee proposed a house swap — exchanging his home for a property a block away, with a car and $500,000 thrown in to sweeten the deal. Capote never responded, saying he didn’t trust the developer. Agave Holdings didn’t respond to requests for an interview.
Capote says his worst time came during construction of the multistory development. Cranes swung over his house, and the street was closed for nearly two years. He filed a complaint with Coral Gables saying the site was unsafe because it violated fire code regulations requiring that access to buildings be no more than 150 feet from the street.
A city official visited and declared it safe. Several months later, when Capote’s elderly mother fell and couldn’t get up, he called fire rescue. Emergency personnel came to his back door but realized they couldn’t get her out that way. “They had to take her out the front door, put her on a gurney, 210 feet to the fire rescue vehicle, because that was how close the vehicle could get” due to the street closure, Capote says. “What more proof do you need that the city violated the fire codes to benefit the developer?”
“They have to find a way to coexist”
Capote’s mother went to the hospital and later a rehab facility, but she never returned home. That episode is part of a 20-year struggle that has left him bitter, especially about local government. “The laws and rules are supposed to be enforced equally to all parties. And in this case, it was not,” he says. “The city repeatedly enforced the laws and rules to the benefit of the developer at our expense.”
Just getting to Orlando Capote’s house requires special directions, taking you down one-way streets in a retail and residential complex to an unmarked alley that ends at his backyard.
Saul Martinez for NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
Saul Martinez for NPR
Just getting to Orlando Capote’s house requires special directions, taking you down one-way streets in a retail and residential complex to an unmarked alley that ends at his backyard.
Saul Martinez for NPR
Coral Gables Mayor Lago says the city is just enforcing long-standing regulations. But he acknowledges that Capote is in a difficult situation — living across the street from a busy 14-story hotel. “Now they’re partners in a rather large piece of property,” Lago says. “And they have to find a way to coexist.”
The irony here is that as one of Florida’s oldest planned communities, Coral Gables has a reputation of careful management of development in a way that’s consistent with the community’s history and character. Capote says that’s one reason he often gets puzzled queries from passersby who ask, “Why is a small house in the middle of this lavish development?”
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
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Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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