For years, independent journalist and activist Grant Stern has fought Walmart’s plans to build a sprawling store on North Miami Avenue in midtown Miami, near nightlife hot spots such as Gigi and Bardot. Stern has filed lawsuits against the project, helping to stall the plan since June.
Miami Beach — a paradise for both tourists and the people who cater to tourists — remains one of the most repressive cities in America when it comes to room-sharing. In most of the city’s residential zones, short-term rentals have long been illegal. Lately, the city has dropped the hammer on Airbnb users, jacking up fines to $20,000 a pop this year. The city has levied more than $3.2 million in fines since March.
If you’ve spent any time with out-of-towners during Art Basel, you’ve probably sighed deeply as they referred to Wynwood as “Miami’s Brooklyn.” At this point, “Brooklynization” is a worldwide scourge: Whether you travel to Miami, Portland, Paris, or Istanbul, you’ll see the same “third-wave” coffee locations, 1920s-style speakeasies, and twee childcare facilities full of parents in beanie hats. Hipster creativity is dead.
As Wynwood has transformed from gritty, graffitied artist haven to high-rent hipster district, developers have turned to a new frontier. Little Haiti has already seen galleries and trendy restaurants creep in. Now the traditionally Caribbean neighborhood will get a huge signature project.
Few parts of the lexicon of American politics are more brazenly undemocratic than “legalized monopoly.” The phrase conjures images of failed nation states and robber-baron America in the 1890s. Government-backed corporations abuse vital resources with impunity, hike fees and scam customers with glee as the government pretends things are cool…
Attention, yard-owning Miamians: For a few hundred bucks, you can spend every weekend until you die drinking beer from the porch of a reclaimed Miami Beach lifeguard stand. If you don’t think that sounds cool, you should probably leave South Florida immediately.
Two things Miamians are tired of: Paying exorbitant amounts of money for rent, and hearing New Times complain about it. Nary a week goes by without some real-estate analyst looking at our housing prices and collapsing with an aneurysm. This week, the analysts turned their attention to Miami’s renters — and the…
Could another real-estate crash hit Miami sometime soon? Some analysts think think so. More than 3,000 condo units became available in the past few years, and a mind-blowing 11,000 are set to hit the market within the next two years. Miami’s housing market took a beating in the past three…
The word “oversight” is not used very often in Miami. You’re supposed to make gigantic life decisions on a whim down here — that’s part of the draw. You can buy a gun, charter a boat, develop a drug habit, or get a neck tattoo, and pretty much nobody will ask any questions.
While they’re more typically used to explain the process of dealing with the loss of loved ones, the five stages of grief can also be applied to our own thoughts of fleeting mortality. There are those of us who deny it, those of us who are angry or depressed at…
Back in July, Miami developer Moishe Mana — the largest landowner in Wynwood — launched a public campaign against Donald Trump. He claimed Trump was a joke, and that no businessman in New York City, Mana’s other hometown, takes Trump seriously. Mana pledged to donate $1 million to a charity…
Like it or not, real estate is the bread and butter of Miami’s economy. In the last four years, more than 3,000 condo units were built in town, and a whopping 11,000 are slated to finish construction by 2018. If it seems like an insane proposition to sell 14,000 new…
Perhaps the most cliche thing you can do in this town is stick your head through a hotel-room window or luxury-car sunroof and scream something dumb, like “I love Miami!” or “Here’s to the life!” into the warm night air. It’s pretty much a rite of passage in South Beach, and…
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the American Legion Harvey W. Seeds Post 29 on 64th and Biscayne — known informally as “the Legion” — was one of the few places in Miami where punks, oddballs, hippies, and veterans mingled regularly. Though there was a bar in the back…
Miami Beach has based its economy on the fact that strangers love to visit and get drunk there. But it wants residents to know that offering those strangers a place to stay through websites like AirBnB is not an option. In the majority of residential Miami Beach, it’s illegal to…
Sometimes, it does get tiring living in a subtropical paradise. Once the summer wall of humidity hits Miami in May, pretty much nobody enjoys being outdoors here. Breathing starts to feel like gasping for air through a wet washcloth. Thankfully, Miamians will be able to get far out of town for…
Five years ago, as a journalism student at Florida International University, Nicole Taylor-Lang started thinking of ways to flesh out her photography portfolio. She didn’t have to look far: just a block away from her home in Greenacres, she found the first subject of what would become a years-long passion…
Obviously, fewer people are going to want to live in Miami once this whole place floods under an onslaught of sea level rise, but most assume that’s going to happen decades from now. But a new study suggests that fears of Miami Beach turning into a modern Venice are already hurting…
Miami Beach’s crackdown on AirBnB and other short-term renters has been swift and brutal. In March, the city changed its rules to levy $20,000 fines on anyone who rents out a space for less than six months, and since then has handed out $1.6 million in fines. But was that…
Real-estate mogul Moishe Mana, the largest landowner in Wynwood, has huge plans for the arts district. He’s trying to convert a space he owns in the neighborhood’s southwest corner into a full arts-themed village, complete with a promenade, shops, galleries, and 24-story residential towers. Mana’s team has spent months crafting…
In Miami Beach, it’s no secret that the hotel industry is the city’s biggest economic engine. City Hall certainly knows who pays the bills. Back in March, the city voted to start fining AirBnB-type short term renters a whopping $20,000 a pop. Hoteliers say the new fines protect the tourism industry…
For the past seven years, Stephanie Coats and her four children have lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Hibiscus Street in West Grove, just four blocks east of bustling CocoWalk. But their building, built in 1948, stands in stark contrast to the Starbucks and Gap stores inside the upscale shopping…
