Business

Ditech, one of America’s largest home-loan companies, achieved fame in the 1990s with TV commercials that showed its competitors complaining they had “lost another loan to Ditech.” The company largely vanished during the 2008 housing crisis but has since rebounded and remains one of the largest mortgage service firms in America. It brings in revenues in excess of $1 billion per year and handles thousands of home-foreclosure cases annually.

Miami’s zoning code states new homes built in Coconut Grove can have square footages up to 80 percent of the lot size, allowing for the largest homes of any municipality in Miami-Dade. Now hundreds of Grove residents have signed a petition demanding that new developments be no larger than 50 percent of lots.

On Saturday, November 11, 65,000 delirious fans packed Hard Rock Stadium for the University of Miami’s biggest home game in years against the hated Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Bars swelled with orange-and-green-clad crowds, and closer to UM’s campus, raucous house parties erupted. One of the largest bacchanals was at a residential home in the nearby neighborhood of Glenvar Heights, where partiers arrived by the busload.

New Times howls, roughly once a week, about how expensive Miami is for the vast majority of its residents. But rarely is the city’s affordability data placed into historic context, likely leaving many people to wonder whether the city’s spiraling rents are really that much worse than they’ve ever been. “Sure, it’s expensive to live in Miami, but it always has been,” you say. “Quit yer bellyaching.”

Despite outcries from community leaders, Little Haiti continues to gentrify rapidly. The Miami neighborhood — which sits conveniently north of Wynwood and the Design District and just west of Biscayne Boulevard — has been getting carved up by thirsty property developers as of late, and that trend has continued unabated in 2017.

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…

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.