The lights have now been turned on at South Beach’s new Five Park tower.
The 48-story tower broke ground in 2021 at the entrance to South Beach. It is said to be taller than any other building in the city of Miami Beach, at 519 feet. When complete, it will include 280 luxury residential units.
The tower was designed by Arquitectonica. Terra and GFO Investments are the developers.
Source: The Next Miami
Major coworking space operator WeWork submitted a move to revoke the lease at its Miami Beach facility.
Based in New York, WeWork submitted a motion to the United States Bankruptcy Court District of New Jersey to reject two leases on April 16. One of the leases is in South Beach at 429 Lenox Avenue. The other is in Irvine, California. On May 31, WeWork may terminate both leases, per court filings.
A spokeswoman for WeWork said the company wants to remain at Lenox Avenue, but has to make preparations to exit in case a deal can’t be worked out. WeWork is the sole tenant in the five-story building.
Source: SFBJ
Developer David Martin acquired a minority stake in the site of the former Deauville Beach Resort, a property that billionaire developer Stephen Ross had under contract two years ago.
Deauville Associates, led by the Meruelo family, sold a 25 percent interest in the 3.8-acre oceanfront property at 6701 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach for $12.5 million. TMG 67 Communities LLC, a company tied to Martin’s Coconut Grove-based Terra, purchased the stake, records show.
A spokesperson for Terra said the firm is “leading plans to bring an iconic development” to the site and suggested that Terra plans to reconstruct the former resort. The company declined to share additional details about its plans.
Terra also did not respond to a request for comment on whether the $12.5 million represents the full amount of its investment in the deal.
The Deauville, a historic hotel built in 1957, designed by Melvin Grossman, was demolished in 2022 after the Meruelos submitted a structural report to the city that determined it was an unsafe structure. The Meruelo family, led by Belinda Mereuelo, was criticized for not maintaining the building. It had been shuttered since 2017.
Source: The Real Deal
Russell Galbut’s plan for a $39.8 million Whole Foods Market-anchored retail building in Miami Beach is getting a kick start after nearly a decade of inactivity.
The Miami Beach Design Review Board on Tuesday approved the planned four-story project spanning 199,000 square feet at 1901 Alton Road. Miami-based Crescent Heights, led by Galbut, Sonny Kahn and Bruce Menin, is under contract to purchase the 1.3-acre site from Wells Fargo.
Crescent Heights would demolish the existing single-story building, currently occupied by a Wells Fargo branch. National grocer Whole Foods and a new Wells Fargo branch would occupy 38,100 square feet of ground-floor and mezzanine level spaces in the new building, documents filed with the city of Miami Beach show. The planned project would also have 277 parking spaces.
Crescent Heights also secured Whole Foods as the anchor tenant at Nema Miami, a mixed-use project in Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood that will have 50,000 square feet of retail space. In 2020, the national grocer signed a 20-year lease with six five-year renewal options, records show.
Source: The Real Deal
On April 25, the Miami Beach’s Planning Board will take a look at the application for the 0.63-acre property located at 1509 and 1515 Washington Ave.
Currently, it consists of a thirteen-unit apartment complex constructed in 1948 and an 11,458-square-foot retail structure added in 1959. Playa Café, Charlotte Bakery, Cheese Burger Baby, and 123 Liquor are some of the recent tenants.
Current property owner Washington Gardens MB LLC has agreed to sell the development site to 1515 Washington Acquisition LLC, co-owned by Xaver Kriechbaum and Gavin Crescenzo of Aventura-based Keyah Real Estate Group, according to the application.
Under the proposal, the property would be developed with a 91,230-square-foot hotel featuring 238 rooms, a 5,677-square-foot restaurant on the ground floor, a pool deck with a small bar on the second floor, and a 3,525-square-foot restaurant on the top floor. There would be no parking on site.
According to the renderings, the property is labeled as a Cloud One Hotel, a European chain with one site in the United States right now, in New York City.
Source: SFBJ
A project is underway on Miami Beach to improve Lincoln Road’s 100, 200 and 300 block and first-phase funds are lined up.
“We started off with a plan for the 100 block, our first phase,” said Peter Kanavos, a partner of the Ritz Carlton Sagamore group. “We’re working subsequently on trying to do the same to revitalize the 200 and the 300 blocks.”
The process is in phases, said Mr. Kanavos. “The monies that we were able to get from the state are going to the first phase, in which we and the city are making equal contributions of $4 million and the state has kicked in about $4.85 million to put towards the reconstruction of the road…. We have something like 7,000 people a day that go back and forth from that beach entrance. It’s a little dilapidated, so we really want to clean that up and make it a beautiful place for people to enter the beach.”
Although the project is well underway, the timeline depends on multiple factors.
“We’re going through an appeal period right now where one of the neighboring hotels has – I think they’re the only people in the whole city that have had objections, which are kind of unclear why, but they’ve been staging an appeal, and that will probably last until sometime this summer,” said Mr. Kanavos. “They already failed with the special magistrate; the first stage of the appeal was this special magistrate. The city and us won that appeal and then I believe the next appeal will not be successful.”
“If we are able to really get over that appeal period, construction of the road would probably start sometime in the first quarter of 2025,” he said, “looking at perhaps 24 months to complete. That can slide. That’s all dependent on a number of factors.”
The improvement was spawned by an analysis he made, said Mr. Kanavos, that showed census statistics that Miami Beach has lost considerable population since 1990. This is most evident in the city center, between Fifth and 23rd streets.
“That has really contributed to a lot of problems, because the eastern end of Lincoln Road, the 100 blocks and 300 blocks in particular – although the whole district – but those areas in particular, are showing the effects of a dwindling neighborhood. We have issues of dereliction, homelessness, crime and so forth,” said Mr. Kanavos.
“What it told me was that we had to repopulate this area as a neighborhood and in order to do that, we have to start really cleaning things up,” he said.
“So the contribution that we made was number one: we reduced the number of our hotel rooms in order to be able to put up a residential condominium, which is going to be part of the Ritz campus.”
For a long time, the city has been living behind a façade of tourism, said Mr. Kanavos.
“That covers up a lot of the sins of a dwindling population,” he said. “If we had been in any other city, without the kind of strong tourist market that we have, and we’d been losing this much population, it would be a disaster.”
Tourism has covered up the issue, but tourists don’t behave like residents do, said Mr. Kanavos. They don’t worry about the crime or a neighborhood becoming seedy – that is, until it gets to the point in which they must go elsewhere to vacation.
“Residents, on the other hand, are engaged,” Mr. Kanavos said. “They have their eyes on the street. If you take a look at South of Fifth, for instance, you look at the character of that neighborhood. It’s clean, it’s neat, it’s safe, because it’s got such a strong residential population. “The first impulse that we had to start this whole thing off was: how do we make this more habitable to bring residential back and that would entail not just building a condominium, but also we wanted to improve the whole quality of the streets,” he said.
The beautification will improve different aspects.
Traffic patterns will be changed in order to make them safer, as currently there are unsafe points, said Mr. Kanavos. An entry monument will be included, inspired by the arts of famed area architect Morris Lapidus that he planned but was never able to effectuate.
“We want to put that entrance monument at the end of the street to mark the beginning of the beach path,” said Mr. Kanavos. “Of course, it’s going to be relandscaped, and we have an art walk planned. We want to be putting public art on both sides of the street – to be determined what – probably, some form of statuary or other forms of art which are to be determined, but we have that plan. It’s really going to become a showcase. And that’s for the 100 block.”
Subsequently, the plans to help the 200 and 300 blocks go through the same transformation are being worked on, said Mr. Kanavos, all part of an effort to turn an area that has been on the decline into a showcase of the city and attract new residents.
“It’s a necessary thing,” said Mr. Kanavos. “It’s been kind of a neglected part of the city even though it’s totally iconic. I mean, when people come to Miami, that intersection between Lincoln and Collins, and Lincoln and Washington, that stretch there has always been one of the most notable parts of the city that people identify Miami Beach with, but in the last few decades it hasn’t seen the kind of attention that it really should get and now we’re trying to rectify that.”
While working on the first phase, they are planning the second: the 200 and 300 block, said Mr. Kanavos. “In fact, we’ve actually already produced a conceptual plan and we’re at the point where we’re just about ready with the county and the city to effectuate the road closure; the ability to close the street off to vehicular traffic on the 200 and 300 block with the idea in mind making an extension of the pedestrian mall further to the west, Lincoln Road Mall.”
The plan is aimed to restore a strong residential component, he said, that will also help businesses thrive due to consistent business residents will provide the stores along Lincoln Road that now battle a fluctuating economy due to dependence on tourism.
“The store owners often tell me that they’re not really getting the kind of tourists that spend a lot of money there,” he said. “I guess you could say they’re underperforming; they’re surviving but underperforming. But we hope to really help the entire district economy by putting a permanent residential base in there that will be long-term residential – in other words, not subject to conversion to short-term rentals, Airbnb and things like that which we feel have really been harmful to the whole neighborhood structure of the central city.”
The project has had tremendous community support, said Mr. Kanavos, with almost universal support “for what’s going on and a great deal of enthusiasm in the city because, in all honesty, we kick-started something that probably should have been done decades ago, but the city often finds itself without the financial wherewithal to do things. They have a lot of demands on their funds.
“By us coming in and putting up monies and also securing, taking the responsibility to secure other monies from the state and so forth,” he added, “we’ve made it financially possible for the city to correct problems in a district that it’s desired to revitalize for some time now.”
Plans will continue to progress in order to finish the job.
“We have committed to actually pay for all the planning costs right through construction on the 200 and 300 block,” said Mr. Kanavos.
“The next steps that we’re working on are going to be to raise money and work … with the property owners in the city to develop a financial plan and other plans to revitalize the two blocks there,” he said. “In essence, for the 200 and 300 blocks, we’re sort of acting as the go-between for our fellow property owners in the city, in order to make the 200 and 300 blocks happen the way we made the 100 block happen.”
Source: Miami Today
A new law in Florida limits the ability of municipalities to prevent the demolition of aging coastal buildings, including architectural icons that have been granted local historical status.
The Resiliency and Safe Structures Act, recently signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis, strips local municipalities of their authority to ban, restrict or prevent the demolition of non-conforming and unsafe structures.
Supporters of the bill say it addresses the safety challenges of aging condo towers in the wake of the deadly 2021 Champlain Towers South collapse, which killed 98 people.
The law creates exceptions for buildings that are on the National Register of Historic Places, but it notably does not exempt municipal historic designations, which potentially could have a major impact on iconic buildings in Miami Beach.
The new law effectively strips the Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board of its power to decide whether historic structures can be demolished and, if a building is going to be knocked down, whether some elements of its design must be preserved or replicated.
The new law allows owners to demolish buildings in high-risk coastal flood zones if local officials deem the structures unsafe or if the buildings don’t conform to the base flood elevation requirements set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The law targets oceanfront buildings along a “coastal construction control line,” which delineates how close developers can build to the coast.
Preservationists are warning that numerous Miami Modernist-style resorts along Collins Avenue in the Mid Beach and North Beach neighborhoods of Miami Beach now on the wrong side of the control line-and most of these historic properties don’t conform to FEMA’s latest elevation requirements.
Lawmakers who supported the Resiliency and Safe Structures Act—which sailed through the state legislature by a 36-2 margin in the Florida Senate and 86-29 in the House—say the measure is long-overdue, not just to address safety concerns but to reign in the power of local preservation boards.
Source: GlobeSt.
Regency Development Group wants to build townhomes near Lincoln Road in Miami Beach.
The Chicago-based developer has filed a proposal for a 10-unit project at 1701 Jefferson Avenue, at the corner of 17th Street, a block north of the Lincoln Road shopping promenade.
Called the Villas on Jefferson, the Kobi Karp-designed development would be split between two buildings, each housing five units spanning roughly 2,800 square feet. All residences will be five stories high and include a two-car garage on the ground floor.
The Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board will hear the proposal April 9.
Regency Development Group, led by Michael Troyanovsky, bought the half-acre site for $4.4 million last year, according to property records. The vacant parcel is now used as a parking lot for the nine-story office building at 1688 Meridian Avenue.
A representative for Regency Development Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The previous owner had proposed a 40-unit residential building with a workforce housing component that the Historic Preservation board approved.
Source: Commercial Observer
Less than a year after starting construction of the Fifth Miami Beach office project, Sumaida + Khurana is proposing a second office building in the city.
New York-based Sumaida + Khurana, led by Amit Khurana and Saif Sumaida, wants to develop the 101,400-square-foot building with a ground-floor restaurant on a 0.8-acre lot at 1100 Fifth Street, near the MacArthur Causeway exit ramp, according to the firm’s filing to the city.
The property owners, Roslyn and Norton Nesis, as well as Robert and Miriam Weiss of Weiss Properties, are partnering on the project.
The building is designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winner Eduardo Souto de Moura, in collaboration with Zyscovich and Gabellini Sheppard.
The Miami Beach Planning Board is expected to vote on the project at its meeting on April 25.
If approved, construction is expected to start in the middle of next year, and completion is expected in the summer of 2026, Khurana said.
Source: The Real Deal
Architecture firm Giller & Giller wants to redevelop a trio of short retail buildings into a $38 million, mixed-use complex, according to a filing to The Miami Beach Planning Board, which will hear the proposal March 26.
Called the Giller Tower, the seven-story development would total 102,701 square feet at 3915 Alton Road, at the intersection with 41st Street near the Julia Tuttle Causeway. The ground floor would house retail space, floors two to four would be dedicated to parking, and the remaining stories would house 50,000 square feet of offices.
The property currently holds three low-rise retail buildings that were constructed between 1938 and 1954 and are leased to UPS, Miami Fresh Fish Market, and restaurants such as Bagel Time Cafe and Grill House. Giller & Giller, a local architecture firm founded in 1944 that’s now led by Ira Giller, is based across the street at the historic, MiMo-style Giller Building.
While Giller & Giller would occupy a small portion of the proposed development, likely 2,000 square feet, “This is primarily a commercial office building leasing venture,” Ira Giller told Commercial Observer. “I think there’s a demand for new Class A office space in Miami Beach.”
Giller estimates that the development will cost $38 million. Construction could begin in early 2025.
The Giller family assembled the half-acre of property between 1980 and 1983, paying $730,000 in total, according to property records.
Source: Commercial Observer