Brownsville was originally a settlement for
white families in the 1920s.
Black families began moving into the neighborhood between the late 1940s and early 1960s as the population surrounding nearby
Liberty Square expanded and many inner-city whites moved to newly built
suburban subdivisions surrounding Miami
city proper in
the wake of World War II. In 1945, two black couples who lived in Brownsville were arrested and jailed for allegedly mishandling their garbage disposal. That same year, members of the
Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in lawns and marched against black home ownership in the area. By the mid-1960s, Brownsville was a thriving community for black professionals. However, the wake of the
Civil Rights Act of 1968 that outlawed
restrictive covenants, and riots in
1968 and
1980 brought about the
black flight of middle and upper-class families from the community. Brownsville experienced continued population loss from 1970 until 2000, as part of a greater
suburbanization trend among the U.S. upwardly-mobile
middle class. Between 2000 and
2010, Brownsville gained population for the first time in over 40 years, rising to 15,313 residents. Construction began on a
transit-oriented development, "Brownsville Transit Village", in 2010, on the site of the
Brownsville Metrorail station parking lot. The project cost $100 million to build, and is composed of 467 units in five
high-rise residential towers with ground-floor retail centered around the Brownsville Metro station. The project was partially funded by the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and is one of the largest transit-oriented and
affordable housing projects in
Miami. ==Geography==