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Miami’s New Face – The city’s downtown and its art community are blossoming, but is luxury coming before the basics?
Miami hopes to revive urban living
The city’s attempt to lure people back to its core could hold lessons for similar efforts in Orlando.
Today, maybe 400 people live in downtown Miami’s central business district, which bustles by day with the suit-and-tie crowd strolling to offices and shoppers browsing jewelry shops and electronic and discount stores.
By Maya Bell | Sentinel Staff Writer
By night, the workers and shoppers leave, turning the downtown core into a dead zone dotted with vacant parking lots. But fast forward to Miami’s near future, and more than 12,000 people will call the area home.
As Orlando launches an ambitious redevelopment of its downtown, a glimpse of what the future may hold is just 250 miles down the road in Miami, albeit on a much larger scale.
Florida’s most cosmopolitan city is experiencing an urban renaissance, putting it several years ahead of Orlando in luring back the essential ingredient for creating an inviting place to live: people.
In downtown Miami, residents will live in sleek towers rising at the mouth of the Miami River, in converted apartments in some of the city’s oldest office buildings or lofts with open floor plans and concrete floors, all within walking distance of movie theaters, museums, concerts, Miami Heat games and waterfront parks.
Head north, past the $255 million performing-arts center under construction on Biscayne Boulevard, and nearly as many new residents will enjoy bay or city views from towers whose names evoke the edgy, artistic direction of this long-blighted uptown neighborhood: Blue. Platinum. Sky. Ice. Quantum.
Head south to Brickell Avenue, and the future already is bursting from the ground amid the banks and office towers in Miami’s financial district. In just the four blocks near the new, 70-story Four Seasons Hotel & Tower, the tallest residential building in the Southeast, construction cranes herald the emergence of 2,500 new apartment or condo units.
Billions in construction
More than $1.8 billion worth of high-rises, midrises, apartments and lofts are under construction in the four-mile stretch encompassing downtown, the financial district and the Biscayne Boulevard corridor. At least $2.5 billion more is in the pipeline, with many plans including sidewalk cafés, shops and stores.
"It gives me goose bumps to think about it," said Miami city Commissioner Johnny Winton, who chairs Miami’s Downtown Development Authority. "We’re on our way to creating a dynamic, hip, 24-7 city."
As did urban-dwellers everywhere, Miamians fled the city core in the 1960s, afraid of crime and in search of better schools and newer housing in the suburbs.
But now empty nesters and young professionals are rediscovering the lure of urban living and swearing off the commute. In Miami, they are joined by Latin Americans, Europeans and snowbirds looking for second homes or sound investments.
Before the first spade of dirt has been turned, they’re plunking down deposits on everything from $99,000 one-bedroom loft apartments to $5 million-plus bayfront penthouses.
"It is a national trend," said John McIlwain, senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute in Washington. "People are moving downtown because it’s cool to live downtown."
‘Close to everything’
For Christian Alfonso, a bank manager in downtown Miami, the suburbs are passé. A Cuban refugee who arrived in Miami during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, Alfonso, 44, has achieved the American dream. His three-bedroom lakeside house in western Miami-Dade County has a pool and two-car garage.
But during rush hour, it’s 90 minutes from downtown, so Alfonso is trading his house for a two-bedroom condo in One Miami, the twin $300 million towers rising at the mouth of the Miami River.
"I’m going to be close to everything — the beach, the nightlife, the Metrorail, the Heat games — and I’m going to avoid sitting in traffic," Alfonso said.
In many regards, Miami is almost a decade behind the times, and Orlando, which is counting on a $140 million three-tower project at Orange Avenue and Church Streets to help revitalize its downtown, is even more so.
Many urban centers, including Chicago, Boston, Washington, D.C., Denver and New York, bloomed anew in the mid-1990s with a new generation of mayors who spent their energies on the nuts and bolts of making their cities work.
"Back in the ’60s and ’70s, the focus was on social equity and people with needs. That’s where the resources and energy went," McIlwain said. "Now we have mayors who realize cities with 24-7 downtowns are economically stronger."
Many factors in boom
Developers, real-estate analysts and urban planners attribute the timing of Miami’s urban boom to myriad factors, including saturated suburbs, pent-up demand and a new sense of stability in city government instilled when Miami Mayor Manny Diaz was elected two years ago.
Amid corruption scandals and a $68 million deficit, Diaz’s predecessor, Joe Carollo, led the city back from bankruptcy but squandered his successes with incendiary invective that often turned commission meetings into circuses.
Unabashedly pro-development, Diaz, a lawyer and businessman in private life, has restored a sense of order and, in consort with Winton, the city commissioner, is pushing Miami as the hottest investment in the nation.
The Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers seem to agree. Their recent survey of real-estate investors put Miami on the list of the top five markets.
"For a long time, Miami was asleep at the switch, but the timing worked out," Diaz said. "In a lot of other places, they have done what they have done, so when [developers] were looking for the next TriBeCa or SoHo, they saw Miami and they said, ‘Wow, this is it.’ "
Out with the old
For Alex Redondo, president of AR Development Group, the more apt phrase might be, "Wow, the time is now." His family began assembling 4½ bayfront acres in uptown Miami 18 years ago, waiting for the right moment to tear down old apartment houses and replace them with luxury high-rises.
The moment is near. In four months, his sales staff has sold more than half the 119 units planned for the first 22-story phase of Platinum, a condo on Biscayne Bay.
Redondo attributes the timing to three factors: his growing confidence in city government, the lowest interest rates in 40 years and greater Miami’s escalating stature in the art world, the most visible sign of which is the performing-arts center straddling Biscayne Boulevard about 15 blocks from the Platinum site. It is scheduled for completion in 2005.
"The performing-arts center should be a catalyst for the whole area," Redondo said.
Orlando is raising money for a planned performing-arts center in its downtown as well.
Long a capital of Latin music and the world’s largest book fair, Miami burst onto the international art scene last year when Art Basel chose Miami Beach as its winter locale.
The world’s most prestigious commercial art fair, Art Basel just returned for its second season, bringing leading galleries, curators and collectors to events throughout Miami, including to an old uptown rail yard where a local artist installed a circus midway.
The installation introduced some of art’s heaviest hitters to other local talent, as well as to New York developer Michael Samuel. A year earlier, the day the first Art Basel debuted, Samuel and his partners bought the 56-acre rail yard.
In February, he’ll start selling units in the first phase of what will be Miami’s largest urban development, Midtown Miami. Plans call for 900 rentals and 3,000 condos, some on cobblestone "muse streets" where artists can live atop their galleries.
Even as some analysts warn that Miami may have a glut of luxury dwellings and insufficient affordable housing, Samuel’s enthusiasm is contagious. Just north of the arts center, Bianca Oakes, a sales agent for Quantum on the Bay, tells prospective buyers they have a chance to be pioneers in the last Miami frontier.
"You can feel the buzz," Oakes said. "Miami is growing up. We’ve had sun, sand and sex. Now we have substance."
Maya Bell can be reached at [email protected] or 305-810-5003.
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