Business

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.

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.

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.

Even under ideal circumstances, finding an apartment or house to rent is an utter nightmare. You spend weeks poring over misleading Craigslist ads with retouched photos, haggling over deposits and monthly fees, and trying to please NIMBY condo boards that hold your entire living arrangement in their hands.

To be poor in America is to give up every second of your free time. It means working ten- or 12-hour shifts folding towels at luxury Miami Beach resorts, only to ride multiple buses two hours there, two hours back, waking up at 4 a.m., and getting home at 8 every night. It means skipping voting or your kids’ graduation because you don’t get paid time off.

Given the building industry’s outsize role in the local ecosystem, you might assume Miami’s construction workers are able to earn a solid living from the profession. But a study released earlier this month shows 44 percent of Miami’s construction workers have trouble paying for basic necessities such as rent, food, hospital bills, utility payments, and items for their children.

Longtime Overtown residents and Miami historians will both tell you that highway overpasses destroyed the neighborhood. The formerly segregated community, which used to be called “Colored Town,” was full of renowned clubs, brightly colored homes, churches, and a thriving mix of Caribbean and African cultures that played itself out in city streets each day.

There comes a point in life when you grow tired of living in six-person apartments, swatting flies from the leftover pastelitos your roommate left congealing on the table, and cleaning up after the feral cats your other housemate insists on bringing into your tiny space. For a huge number of people, that desire comes right after college ends.

Do-nothing, intellectually bankrupt politicians often refer to Miami as a “boom-and-bust” town. The city’s economy, which is almost entirely based on real-estate trades, rises and falls rapidly, they say. It expands as foreign investors flood the market with cash and crashes once that river of money dries up…

In September 2015, the company that owns Miami’s Magic City Casino — West Flagler Associates — tried to apply for a license to open up a new poker room in downtown Miami, through an arcane licensing process involving “summer jai-alai” permits.