This reminds me of the Pixar movie, "UP"

[theking]

"The old man and the high-rise: His tiny home surrounded, he battles developer over dying garden"







On Fifth Avenue in the rapidly changing Flagler Village, a humble house surrounded by a forest of tropical trees looks like it’s about to be swallowed by a five-story wall of pale gray concrete.

Julliano Jeyamo, the feisty owner of a tiny home now dwarfed by the mammoth high-rise that’s sprouted next door, says he’s been battling the project’s big shot developer for two years — and losing.

It’s a classic David and Goliath tale unfolding on a once sleepy street in Flagler Village, an up-and-coming neighborhood in downtown Fort Lauderdale fast being overtaken by high-rise apartments, where zoning changes have created a collision of old Fort Lauderdale and the flashy future.

Jeyamo, a 68-year-old native-born Israeli, says little guys like him are being pushed out. But he refuses to go.

“I don’t want to sell,” said Jeyamo, who bought the wood-framed cottage at 714 Northeast Fifth Avenue for $46,000 in 2001. “This is my house. I wouldn’t sell it for any amount of money.”

Jeyamo’s home was built in 1931, long before the development boom hit Flagler Village — a boom courted by city leaders to transform a blighted area on the edge of downtown and secure Fort Lauderdale’s status as the urban center of Broward County, all while lining city coffers with more tax dollars.

To encourage growth, city officials zoned the area high-density in the 1980s, allowing developers to build right up to property lines, regardless of what lies next door.

Jeyamo’s modest two-bedroom home, all of 878 square feet, now sits in the shadow of what Jeyamo calls the monster project that borders his property: Quantum Flagler Village, a $160 million mixed-use development at 701 North Federal Highway with two 15-story apartment towers, a nine-story Marriott and a five-story parking garage that casts permanent shade on his yard.

Jeyamo says he lost more than peace and quiet when the construction cranes and buzzing chainsaws settled in next door. He also lost his lush green garden with its cheery burst of pink and yellow flowers. The peaceful sanctuary, so carefully tended over the years, now looks more like a place where things come to die, Jeyamo says.