Doral: a city is born: the Doral/airport west area has long been Miami-Dade's center for international commerce, with a vast industrial and commercial infrastructure serving Miami International Airport. Now it is becoming a residential enclave, as the newest city to be incorporated in the county

South Florida CEO, Feb, 2004 by Johanna Marmon, Barbara Perkins

A recent sign of the times in the City of Doral came when Century HomeBuilders sold 20 acres of land inside its sprawling Islands at Doral residential development to the Miami-Dade County School Board for a 2,000-student high school. The $1.5 million price tag was a steal--Century CEO Sergio Pino says the land is easily worth $700,000 an acre--but the developer says it was an altogether necessary move in a fledgling city that's attracting young families in droves.

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"We took a hit there but it's definitely okay," says Pino, whose residential-development company last year posted its best annual numbers in history, closing on some 1,300 homes, most of them in Doral. "Now the people I sell my homes to will see a school." When complete in the next couple of years, the public high school will become the first in the City of Doral, not to mention "a prime example of how the development community is meeting its social responsibilities to the communities in which they build," says Pino.

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Islands at Doral is the largest residential development in the newly minted City of Doral, incorporated just last June from the swatch of Miami-Dade County land collectively known as Airport West--and sometimes just Doral. The other large developer of homes in the area is mega-builder Lennar, which also has its corporate headquarters in Doral; both firms credit still-low interest rates as one key reason for their brisk business in home sales.

While rates have stimulated home buying everywhere, developers in Doral have been doing a booming business because the city has become Miami-Dade's latest--and among its last--residential frontiers, offering attractive compounds in an otherwise bustling hub of international business. Fully 30 percent of Doral is now residential, says Mayor Juan Carlos Bermudez, an attorney who works in the city. That is a major shift for the thriving commercial center, rife with industrial and office space.

For years, Doral and the surrounding Airport West area has served as the industrial heart of the international trade community, with vast warehouse complexes serving the shipping needs of nearby Miami International Airport (MIA). More recently, it has grown into the largest office submarket in Miami-Dade County, surpassing those of downtown Miami and Coral Gables. But what has spurred the creation of the City of Doral has been an explosion of residential development, and the arrival of young families in search of lower prices and more space.

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At the International Mall on 107th Avenue, for example, La Ideal Baby Store is thriving. On weekends, there is a steady stream of traffic in the store, with parents searching for cradles, baby furniture, strollers and clothes for their toddlers. "Saturdays and Sundays are big days for us now," says store manager Herbert Santana. "There are a lot of people living around here now."

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That is apparent in other places in the mall, at the oversized (120-seat) San Marco Italian restaurant, or at the thriving La Carreta restaurant, which started out in Little Havana; its Doral outlet, with its palm trees and stucco arches, looks like it came straight out of the set of Casablanca. On weekends, families with children frequent the eatery, and throughout the mall are other stores serving that demographic--Bed Bath & Beyond, Pier 1, Toys 'R' Us.

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"I was renting in Coral Gables but I bought a home in Doral," says new resident Dina Allende, who owns a PR firm in the area. "Doral is very family oriented--my sister and her kids live here--and there are lots of new schools and new restaurants. Archie's Pizza from Coral Gables just opened here. I'm thrilled."

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Nowhere is the sudden sense of community more apparent than at Pino's Isles at Doral. At 500 acres, Islands will have a total of 3,000 single family homes, condominiums and town homes by 2007. So far, says Pino, Century has sold 1,100 of the residences, with 1,900 left in company coffers. But the roll-out is purposely calculated; the development, which is selling in phases, has to utilize a lottery to fairly deal with demand. "We've got a list of about 1,000 families registered to buy at Islands," says Pino.

What attracts them is both price and green space. Outside the gates there are swampy fields of maleleuca trees and power lines. Inside walls of earth that surround the development there are huge lakes, clusters of homes, baseball diamonds, a soccer field, a clubhouse, water falls and a pool. Kids are playing on grassy fields, while adults jog the landscaped paths that curve through the development. It's about as far away as you can get from the feeling of the commercial hustle that has long marked Doral/Airport West, but not unlike the feeling of the Doral Golf Resort and Spa, which gave the area its name when its developers, too, decided to create an oasis of green in western Miami-Dade County.