Miami Beach modern; Miami Beach has gone through a series of transformations over the decades, from glamour days in the 1950s to retirement enclave in the 1970s. Today it has become an affluent community, rich in the arts, appealing as much to businesses as it does to tourists

South Florida CEO, April, 2004 by Rochelle Broder-Singer

The city is studying traffic patterns--and transit alternatives. The mayor and city commission remain at odds over Baylink, a proposed trolley system on the Beach and rail connection to the City of Miami. Although the city commission voted to go ahead with Baylink (still in the "study" phase and probably decades away from realization), Dermer remains against it. "My vision of really good public transit is medium-sized buses--if you want to make them look like trolleys, make them look like trolleys--and you link the entire city of Miami Beach with all of the coastal communities," he says.

The transit issue also touches on another key problem the city is facing: a lack of affordable housing, for everyone from nurses at Mount Sinai to staff at the city's hotels. "It's tough to compete with other hospitals that are in bedroom communities when yours is not," says Mount Sinai's Sonenreich. The city is trying to address those concerns through mass transit offerings that will bring workers onto the Beach from the mainland, and through the Miami Beach Community Development Corporation, which spends $3 million to $4 million each year trying to increase the Beach's affordable housing stock.

The rising traffic congestion and housing costs are no surprise, however, when you understand what all the people who flow into Miami Beach each year are looking for--the life that architect Barry Klein, president of the North Beach Development Corporation, found when he moved his Klein Design Group into a North Beach office. "I love to be able to go down the elevator and hit the street and just see people," he says. "I'm looking out the window right now and seeing ocean." And while the bohemian, wild west days of Miami Beach are probably long passed, something new has set in.

"The restaurants, the high-level businesses you find in mature cities, they're all beginning to end up here," says developer Robins, who has lived in Miami Beach his whole life, and was among the Art Deco district's development trailblazers with stepbrother Craig Robins. "And that sort of represents the end of the pioneering, and that Miami Beach has finally come into its own."

Commercial Real Estate: Miami Beach office space has the highest vacancy
rate in Miami-Dade County

Snapshot: Year-End 2003         Overall    Class A

Net Rentable Area (sq. ft.):  1,849,179    583,000
Vacancy Rate                      22.0%      52.3%
Average Rent ($/per sq. ft.)     $27.01     $31.08
YTD Net Absorption (sq. ft.)  (123,074)  (135,433)

Source: CB Richard Ellis Miami Office Market Outlook 2004

The Rising Value of Miami Beach Property

       Billions

'00      $8.3
'01      $9.4
'02     $10.6
'03     $11.9

Source: City of Miami Beach

Note: Table made from bar graph.

RELATED ARTICLE: PAST PRESENT

The Art Deco district inspired a city that values keeping yesterday's architecture alive.

Miami Beach might still be a sleepy retirement enclave if not for Barbara Baer Capitman's vision of preserving South Beach's Art Deco and Mediterranean Revival architecture. With the Miami Design Preservation League, she fought for the designation of the US's first and largest 20th Century National Historic District, 25 years ago this May. The district later attracted fashion photographers, and helped start Miami Beach's revival as a bastion of American hipness. "We know it spurred the economic revitalization," says MDPL executive director Denise Katakis. "They said, 'If we create a unique visual experience for people who come here, they'll come back.'"