For 92 years, Miami Beach Community Church’s courtyard has been a sanctuary. The small, shaded square was one of the only clean spots back in the ’80s as South Beach spiraled downwards. And in the past 10 years, as Lincoln Road has roared back to life, the courtyard has remained…
Listen, building fancy-ass condo buildings for rich foreigners to buy on Miami Beach is not an art form. It’s business. It’s pure capitalism. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, but trying to claim otherwise gives off a vibe of mind-numbing pretension. Argentinian developer Alan Faena is busy building his “Faena District,”…
Greg Gopman has a very fitting name. The University of Florida grad and founder of the now-defunct Weekend Gator bus service moved to San Francisco in September 2011 to form a startup, AngelHack. After two years, the wannabe entrepreneur is apparently still appalled by the homeless population there. Gopman, who…
No one is sure if Alex Rodriguez will ever play another Major League Baseball game again, but it looks like he might have a promising back-up career as a Miami Beach real estate flipper. A-Rod bought a new condo unit in Midbeach’s Mei building this past June for $2.1 million…
It’s not just the lower classes that continue to get hit hard by foreclosures in South Florida. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area leads the nation in foreclosures on properties worth more than $5 million, according to real estate website RealtyTrac. In fact, about a fourth of all high-end foreclosures in…
In Wynwood, even the sky often seems spray-painted. On a recent evening, two young women were suspended in midair on metal scaffolding, masks over their mouths, aerosol cans in their hands. As the setting sun shifted heaven’s hues above them, the women unleashed waves of color onto a white warehouse…
Art critic Robert Hughes once quipped of artist Jeff Koons that “he has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida.” The irony, of course, is that Koons work is now being used as a marketing gimmick to sell…
Complete economic recovery still stubbornly refuses to come to Miami-Dade County. Even as Florida’s unemployment rate dropped to the lowest point its been since August 2008, Miami-Dade’s rose for the month of October to 8.5 percent…
TLC, already home to shows that we imagine have titles like Extreme Cougar Hoarders, Sextuplet Sex Addict Brides, I Didn’t Know I Was a Cupcake, is preparing its latest televised sideshow. It’s a new special called Buying Naked which looks like a cross between House Hunters and the softcore porn…
Miami is an area that caters openly to youthful urges. Clubs are open till the wee hours. The cultural scene continues to grow. We’ve got beaches and bike gatherings and bacchanals galore, but perhaps the metro area isn’t so great at catering to youthful needs. The Miami/Fort Lauderdale/Pompano Beach metro…
The Richie Incognito scandal is in that weird place where we understand that it’s pretty serious but also so over-the-top in some weird sports soap opera-style that sometimes you can’t help but laugh. So with the help of Witstream, we rounded up the best tweets about the scandal from professional…
A corporate affiliate of the Mormon Church announced it’s finalizing a deal with St. Joe Company that will bring its overall land ownership to nearly 670,000 acres.
So last night I was live blogging and tweeting up a storm about election results, but I sort of had a personal chip on my shoulder. See, I like voting, and, after having previously lived in Coral Gables, this was my first time casting a ballot in a City of…
If you’re some libertarian geek you might be interested in Bitcoin as your new form of alternative currency. If you’re a jet-setting billionaire then you probably prefer Miami luxury condos. Yes, Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of Miller Samuel Inc., says the world’s wealthy elite are pretty much using Miami…
Self-taken photos are — as a general rule — of no use or interest to anyone but the narcissistic subject. From the era of Myspace angle shots to the age of the Instagram duck face, this has been a true, verifiable fact. A Florida high school student has just shattered…
Burger King is one of the largest companies with global headquarters in Miami-Dade. Which is, in theory, great for the local economy, but BK’s practice of paying its restaurant employees low wages may not be so great for the American economy. A new study estimates that Burger King employees might…
Midtown could see a budget big-box Walmart and a fancy luxury hill under construction at the same time. Hyde Midtown, the sister hotel of SLS South Beach, is set to begin early next year, and Ex Miami has renderings of the Arquitectonica-designed tower…
The Nakash family recently purchased Gianni Versace’s Ocean Drive mansion for $41.5 million, and judging from their public comments so far, they have either way too many ideas about what to do with it or no ideas whatsoever. At first, their holdings company indicated it would be used as a…
Miami is less than four years removed from an epic real estate crash that wrecked the local economy, but it seems lately that new luxury condos are breaking ground every week. Most of the local economy is still in shambles. Unemployment remains high. The vast majority of local residents are…
On one side, there’s the billion-dollar cruise industry and Key West’s powerful chamber of commerce sinking thousands of dollars into a campaign to convince islanders to dredge 17 acres of sea floor to allow larger ships and thousands more tourists to visit. On the other, environmentalists, preservationists, and their leader…
A cynic looking at Miami’s art boom over the past decade could make a strong argument that the art scene has been used as little more than a pawn by developers with the ultimate goal of selling more real estate. (See: the gentrification of Wynwood as the most obvious example.)…
A company associated with the Nakash family, which made its money off of Jordache jeans, recently won the bidding for the Casa Casuarina, more popularly known as the Versace mansion, on Ocean Drive. At first the new owners said they’d operate it as a boutique hotel in connection with the…
