Hurricane Battered Florida City--but Not Its Spirit of Renewal : Amid the rubble and the scores who remain homeless, many are still optimistic that the area will transform itself into a model community.

Mounds of rubble still line most roadways, hundreds of local residents are still living doubled up with friends or relatives, and it could be years before the shattered trees again provide any shade in this sun-stricken town at the end of the Florida peninsula.

“When someone drives in here for the first time, there is still a reasonable amount of shock,” says Bill Kiriloff, an assistant city manager. “There is still a lot of debris, a lot of homes scheduled for demolition. In some ways, it doesn’t look much different from the day after the hurricane.”

Yet six months since Hurricane Andrew rumbled through here in the early morning darkness of Aug. 24, there is not only optimism that Florida City, once listed as the sixth-poorest town in the United States, will survive the storm, but that it will be transfigured into a model community. Miami architect Andres Duany, a renowned town planner, studied the scene and announced: “This city has the extraordinary chance to become a great place.”

William Dorsett, 59, believes. He recalls only too vividly how he, his wife, his daughter and his grandchildren huddled in a closet as the storm’s 150 m.p.h. winds ripped his house apart but spared their lives. On the day after, Dorsett climbed out of the wreckage, had a look around and said: “It looks like I’m going down.”

But he didn’t. He got some insurance money and started repairs. He rebuilt the walls, put on a new roof, repainted. He bought a new truck to replace the one Andrew totaled. When the house next door was demolished, Dorsett bought the lot. He plans to plant fruit trees.

Dorsett looks down Northwest 10th Street today and says, “I’m happy.”

In battered South Dade County, happiness is relative, however, and not universal. More than 40 people were killed by Andrew, a storm that stands as the most costly natural disaster in U.S. history. Damage estimates are put at $20 billion.

Psychologists continue to report a high incidence of storm-related stress and anxiety, particularly among children.

Some 250,000 people were left homeless by the storm, and many remain unsettled. Just this week, months after emergency shelters were shut down, county officials began to erect a tent city for 125 families.

In all, up to 5,000 people still have been unable to find permanent housing.

Still, in Florida City, an agricultural town of 6,000 residents that is overwhelmingly black and Latino, many see Hurricane Andrew as an ill wind that may have blown in the seeds of renewal.

“You take a city like ours, where housing was below average to begin with, and you do anything and you almost have to go up,” says Kiriloff. “I’ll be real honest--I see this working well for us. It’s just slow.”

Indeed, from offices in trailers parked next to the ruins of city hall, beleaguered city officials, many left homeless themselves, describe a nightmarish battle to wrest money from the bureaucracy. Florida City did receive $1.2 million from the state in December, and some $75,000 has come in as gifts from other cities, says Kiriloff.

But, adds Kiriloff, that’s not enough. “If I had one wish, I’d say, ‘President Clinton, six months after the hurricane, how would you like to spend a day in our office and see what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), your two federal agencies, haven’t done?’ The bureaucracy is unbelievable.”

Without more money, officials say, developers who are waiting to work here are stalled, as is the highly touted plan by Duany to turn poor Florida City into a model community that would not only provide affordable housing to its multiethnic residents, but draw tourists as well.

Although Florida City is poor--37% of households live below the poverty level--it does have a favorable location at the end of the Florida Turnpike. Each year some 6 million visitors pass through Florida City, either heading to the main entrance to Everglades National Park, immediately to the west, or heading south to the Florida Keys. And with nothing to stop them, most of those 6 million travelers do pass through.

In the plan suggested by Duany and other planners who took part last October in an intensive planning session, Florida City would develop a “Pioneer Village” theme along its main street restored with shops, galleries and even a museum. Surrounding the main street, existing neighborhoods would be rebuilt according to designs preferred by the various ethnic groups that now live here.

Harrison Rue, a builder working with Duany’s firm, says the first step is to rebuild city hall and the fire station.

“It is critical to get some civic reconstruction project under way so people can see something new going up,” says Rue. “Then the community can get involved in the design process.”

Kiriloff, for one, wishes he had time to help set up an architectural review board and ponder Florida City’s rebirth as a tourist attraction. But he’s got 100 more houses to demolish, a two-hour meeting with FEMA to attend, a woman with a crushed septic tank on the phone and an impatient police chief who wants to know when his eight new patrol cars are coming.

Meanwhile, just outside the city limits, where the wreckage of one-time trailer parks gives way to fields of beans and tomatoes, Juanita Mainster of Centro Campesino, a farm workers cooperative, is welcoming Allen Walquist and 35 other volunteer home builders who just arrived after a 36-hour drive from northwest Iowa. They will spend this week frying their pale skin in the hot South Florida sun while patching roofs and putting up drywall.

“There has been an incredible response from people who want to help,” says Mainster. “Church groups from all over the country, the Mexican government, food, water and clothing worth $2 million.

“I think our people here, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, have been brought together by all this. Many had a near-death experience, and they were given a second chance. They see people care. We have a sense of community now. We were all but knocked out by the storm. But we have come back.”