A few months ago, a Coral Gables homeowner made national headlines when he put his $6.4 million mansion on the market and said he’d accept payment in Bitcoin. So when a seller approached luxury real-estate agent Eric Fernandez with a similar proposition, he was ready for the challenge.
Miami’s unsustainable real-estate boom would inevitably reach a point when it would eat itself. Absent planning and regulation, condo developers were all but certain to begin repaving integral things like the library or city hall when the rest of downtown’s buildable land dried up.
For the past two years, three miles of roadway, including Flagler Street, has been under massive reconstruction to replace a 74-year-old water main, sidewalks, and traffic signals. Since then, dozens of Little Havana businesses have closed because of lost customers and revenue. Unfortunately, in May, Edukos, a Venezuelan gastropub, opened on West Flagler, just a block from Marlins Park. Because of the construction, John Guilarte, Edukos’ owner, struggles to keep the restaurant open.
After moving from Manhattan to Fort Lauderdale last month, Stephen Dietz and his wife were excited to snag a two-bedroom apartment in the 30-story Amaray Las Olas, a new luxury tower said to be one of the most expensive apartment buildings ever built in the city. Barely a year old, their home at 215 SE Eighth Ave. boasted private pool cabanas, a yoga studio, and a dog spa.
One of the main programs that helps poor people pay rent, the Section 8 housing voucher, awards money to needy families to help them afford privately owned apartments. But the feds won’t pay for a waterfront penthouse — rent needs to sit below a “fair market rent” threshold, a guideline the government uses to determine whether you’re blowing too much cash on a fancy home.
Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond has called the mortgage-interest tax deduction — which lets property owners cut up to $1 million off their tax bill — an “engine of American inequality.” The Atlantic once labeled the policy “a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the American tax code.”
“The point is to be able to restore power more quickly,” Bubriski says. “There is no amount of hardening that is going to stop a 50-foot-tall date palm from falling on the lines.”
While packing up to evacuate his South Beach condo this week, Daniel Ciraldo saw his neighbors at an eight-unit Art Deco building scramble to MacGyver last-minute hurricane fixes. With plywood long sold out, some taped their windows, while others pushed their mattresses against them. It all seemed so inefficient. “The…
Over the past couple of years, Miami Beach’s hip Sunset Harbour neighborhood has weathered its fair share of big storms. After a thunderstorm last October, Pubbelly Sushi flooded with nearly six inches of water. A dispute over the street levels led an insurance company to refuse to pay a claim…
Even a novelist reaching for a heavy-handed metaphor about Miami’s tendency toward unsafe overdevelopment would have winced at a Tuesday press release sent by the city. Because it seems the dozens of cranes towering over the new luxury condo towers rising over Brickell and Downtown could literally kill you if…
Despite every headline-grabbing attempt to fuel the tech sector or the finance market, at its condo-flipping heart Miami is still a company town, and the only industry that keeps the lights on is real estate. So any national survey that ranks the Magic City nearly dead last for its property-selling prospects is very bad news for anyone in South Florida.
When the City of Miami Beach created a MiMo architecture historic district to protect its Morris Lapidus-designed, mid-20th-century buildings a few years ago, officials considered including the beachfront stretch along Collins Avenue from 53rd to 63rd Street. But there was a problem: The huge condo towers on either side of the street create “an almost continuous ‘canyon’ wall effect on both sides…”
A Miami real-estate analysis released Monday sheds light on the wonderfully stupid way South Florida operates: For the past handful of years, condo prices in the area have been criminally high, so condo developers have laid waste to any undeveloped piece of land they could find, stacking buildings into the sky regardless of whether anyone would buy them.
Each time a new retailer began accepting Bitcoin as payment a few years ago, Mike Komaransky made a small purchase to signal his confidence in the digital currency.
Yvonne Rodriguez nervously rapped on the front door of a Westchester home. She’d arrived to see her brother’s santera, Dulce, for insight into her future. In a cramped backroom with a card table draped in a white tablecloth, surrounded by statues of saints and offerings of fruit, Yvonne paid her $21 fee and looked to Dulce for answers.
Last year, the Miami-Dade County Commission shot down a plan that would have forced local developers to include some affordable apartments in every new project. Commissioner Javier Souto claimed the idea was “social engineering,” one of the most profoundly stupid things said in South Florida politics this decade.
Due to the water management issues, South Florida’s poor water quality has resulted in dying fish populations and seagrass plots. With the ecological disaster, local boat manufacturers find their businesses struggling to stay afloat as customers pull out of purchasing small fishing boats to pole the area.
Under flashing neon green and purple lights, a busty dancer whips her blond hair and grinds against a pole, her bikini top pulled up to her collarbone. It’s “Tip Out Saturday” at Club Climaxxx, a gentleman’s club in North Miami-Dade, and hordes have come to see buxom dancers strip and…
Over the past three years, ridesharing companies such as Uber and Lyft have not only decreased the demand for taxi services in Miami-Dade County, but also depreciated the taxi industry’s most valuable asset: the medallion.
Miami-Dade County’s median income — a scant $44,000 — is remarkably low compared to virtually every other city of its size. This creates a whole host of problems for local and longtime residents. International billionaires jack up the city’s property values, inflating rental prices and forcing Miamians to either leave town or spend the highest share of their income on rent compared to residents of any other American city.
Almost a year ago, the Florida Department of Health announced Wynwood was ground zero for Zika, the only place in the United States where the virus was being spread by mosquitoes. Soon after, the CDC began telling pregnant women to avoid traveling to the area, and a kind of panic hit local streets.
With rents and housing prices soaring ever higher across Miami-Dade County, how do locals afford to live here? New Times set out to find out by talking to Miamians with varying income levels about how they make life in South Florida work for them. This is the first story in a series.
