You need to be filthy rich.
The teensy, exclusive island community of Indian Creek Village, tucked off the coast of Miami Beach, was built in the early 1900s for Miami's rich and famous. The gated and guarded stretch of roughly 40 lots has since become a haven to some of the world's wealthiest. On any given day, you might find Ivanka Trump, DJ David Guetta, or football legend Tom Brady tooling around the refuge.
One might assume the island is immune to the economic forces plaguing the commoners on Miami's mainland, where rising property prices are forcing countless working-class locals out of the area.
But as the rich get richer and Miami continues to attract ultra-wealthy newcomers, Indian Creek is experiencing "its own version of gentrification" — with billionaires displacing the neighborhood's millionaires, according to a new Bloomberg report.
"The merely affluent are now being displaced by the fabulously wealthy," the report reads.
Real estate broker Dina Goldentayer, who has been involved in three of the island's five most recent sales, told Bloomberg that prices for homes revamped to the "standards of billionaires in Indian Creek" may soon start at $100 million.
In decades past, by contrast, homes on the island readily sold for well under $10 million. Investor and short seller Carl Icahn bought his Indian Creek house for $7.5 million in 1997, and around 30 years ago, Colombian billionaire Jaime Gilinski shelled out $6 million for a property on the island, where he now owns several parcels.
Goldentayer explained that the real estate market on Indian Creek, known as "Billionaire Bunker," has shifted from just seven years ago when "there would be five or six listings at the same time and $20 million was a big sale."
Back across the bay, Miami residents are being pushed out of more humble abodes on a mass scale.Lol when the billionaires start gentrifying the millionaires out of Miami pic.twitter.com/hDHp9Ueo70
— Andrew Otazo (@AndrewOtazo) January 15, 2024
Since 2019, rental prices have increased more in Miami than nearly any other major metro area, according to Zillow. One study found that the average renter in Miami must make a six-figure salary to avoid becoming "rent-burdened" (i.e., spending more than 30 percent of personal income on rent).
Property prices nationwide have been climbing in recent years, but South Florida outpaced the rise in U.S. housing costs by a wide margin thanks to heavy demand from foreign investors and a COVID-19-era deluge of affluent new arrivals from out of state.
During the pandemic, the well-to-do and wealthy flocked to the Miami metro area and Florida as a whole, seeking tax breaks and a tropical climate in which to live while working remotely. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Florida had the largest population growth of any state in the 2021-2022 reporting period.
Silicon Valley billionaires like PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel were part of an influx of "big-money migrants" to Miami during this time, earning the city the nickname “Little Manhattan." In June 2022, one of the wealthiest hedge fund operators in the world, Ken Griffin, announced that he would be moving his firm Citadel's headquarters to Miami.
Check out: "Meet Miami's 10 Richest Billionaires"
In August 2023, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought his first property in Indian Creek Village – a $68 million estate next to the home of hedge fund manager Edward Lampert. Bezos then snapped up a neighboring $79 million, seven-bedroom mansion in October, bringing his total investment in Indian Creek property to $147 million.
