SoHo Beach House: $460,000. Prime Italian restaurant: $280,000. Blockbuster video: $25,000. It reads like a bill for a raging Art Basel party. In fact, it’s just a few of the fees that local businesses owe the City of Miami Beach. Because of billing mistakes and lax enforcement, however, officials now…
If Bay Harbor Islands, the two-island, 5,000-person town on Biscayne Bay between North Miami and Bal Harbour, is known for anything, it’s MiMo architecture. But at a commission meeting earlier this week, the town moved closer to breaking away from the county’s historic building preservation rules, and some town residents…
The Miami Marine Stadium is coming back. It’s really coming back. After sitting dormant and abandoned for over 20 years, the Miami International Boat Show is expected to announce that they’ll move their 2016 and 2017 editions from Miami Beach to the Virginia Key aquatic stadium. Though renovations haven not…
Sears, the department store that time, fashion trends, and shoppers forgot, is struggling nationwide. Decades of dwindling sales have put the once-great chain’s future in question, but the company has proposed a radical strategy for its location at Aventura Mall that may signal the future of the company. Sears execs…
On October 20, blogger Al Crespo published a story lambasting SkyRise developer Jeff Berkowitz as “duplicitous” and a “hypocrite” for seeking public funds for the massive and controversial building project, which stalled in the county commission yesterday over a proposed $9 million subsidy. Now, Crespo says the developer is hitting…
Months if not years late to the story, the New York Post decided to check in this weekend on development in Edgewater. According to the Post’s take, the area was full of “vagrants” before and is now quickly turning into some family friendly area where actual Miamians will live and…
Divine intervention it is not, but a last minute decision by a city official has thrown a Miami Beach mega development project into sudden disarray. Earlier today, Miami Beach’s special master ruled that the city’s Historical Preservation Board had erred in approving a controversial plan to turn a historic church…
The internet is constantly ranking cities to the point where we wonder if there’s any criteria left to rate cities by. Well, Real Estate firm Redfin has come up with a novel ranking: toilets per capita. As it turns out, Miami has the least amount of residential toilets per capita…
When news broke that County Mayor Carlos Giminez was mulling a plan to give millions in subsidies to the oddly shaped SkyRise observation tower, his administration also noted it wanted to shepherd money to 20th Century Fox’s plan to build a theme park on land near Zoo Miami. But details…
Lincoln Road’s transformation from bohemian strip to a sunny urban outpost for suburban mall chain stores continues. The nonprofit ArtCenter South Florida has sold their outpost at 800 Lincoln Road to developers for a tidy $88 million. See also: ArtCenter/South Florida Is Selling Its Iconic Lincoln Road Gallery Building…
It seems a bit odd that in light of Miami’s out-of-control condo boom, the full plans for midtown Miami still have not come to fruition. This despite the fact that it was one of the few development projects that really thrived during the valleys between the booms. Well, according to…
For Collon Brown, the revelation came in Toronto, when he was fiddling around with the large elastic bands that are used as truck tie-downs. Brown had already burned out of his career as a graphic designer and had lately become obsessed with yoga, meditation, and righting his body and mind…
Rankings-happy real estate site Movoto pulled out all the stops this week. It ranked nearly every ZIP code in the nation from best to worst. Of course, it’s a real estate site, so the criteria for “best” really means something more like “nicest to live in.” It also means the…
In Miami, construction cranes are multiplying like late-summer swarms of mosquitoes, and every week it seems a new luxury high-rise hits the marketplace. Only New York has more million-dollar listings than the Magic City. And residents without the wallets to drop a few mil on a condo with a Ferrari…
For years , a Miami city agency has sought to secure $60 million for a massive project in chronically impoverished Overtown. But now that the project is finally close to breaking ground, a local activist is claiming the Southeast Overtown/Park West Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) illegally failed to hire any…
Update: The project has passed the city commission with a unanimous vote. Now, developers will turn to the local CRA to negotiate tax breaks for the convention center space. Life as a City of Miami commissioner must be confusing these days. After years of post-property-bust austerity and solemn promises to…
Just beyond Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands in Cape Romano sits a collection of odd white-domed structures in the middle of the water. They look like Miami’s Stiltsville meets some postapocalyptic sci-fi movie. The uninformed have spread a lot of rumors about what the domes could possibly have been: abandoned cult…
UPDATE: City commissioners postponed a decision on the club for another six months. Lowe said he is relieved, but only temporarily. “I don’t believe the war is over,” he said. The fate of Wynwood’s only nightclub could come down to a debate over Grandpa’s wrinkled nutsack. Let me explain. This…
Quick. Which neighborhood in Miami do you think gives the biggest percentage of its income to charity? The exclusive enclave of Fisher Island? The rich families of Coral Gables? The retirees in Miami Beach? Nope. Not even close. Miami’s most charitable ZIP code is 33056. That’s a neighborhood in none…
How high are prices is Miami real estate? Well, only overpriced, densely packed Manhattan has more listings on the market priced at $1 million or more. The city of Miami comes in second, while Miami Beach has the third most. Though, Miami Beach has far more listings in the $5…
It took more than six hours, a frantic round of last-minute backroom negotiations, and dozens of speeches from backers and lobbyists, but the massive Miami Worldcenter project passed one of its last remaining roadblocks at the city commission last night. The commission eventually voted 4-0 to approve key zoning agreements…
This thing definitely looks like it belongs in some superhero or dystopian sci-fi movie. We just can’t tell if it’s the secret headquarters of the good guys or bad guys. Fairholme Fund, an investment fund worth $17 billion and run by Bruce Berkowitz, is moving into Edgewater, further signaling the…
