As massive developments stir controversy in Miami, planning board wants to hit brakes
In a city driven by real estate development, it’s uncommon for government to take bold action against developers’ interests. On Wednesday night, Miami’s planning and zoning board made a strong statement about the future of redevelopments on large swaths of the city’s neighborhoods: Stop doing them — or at least stop doing them the way they’ve been done for a decade.
The board voted 8-1 to draft a resolution calling for city commissioners to repeal a section of Miami’s zoning code that allows developers to redesign Miami at least 9 acres at a time, massive redevelopments called special area plans or SAPs. Several board members were ready to make a formal recommendation to the City Commission, but a city attorney advised them they needed to draft a resolution and vote on it at a future meeting.
Wednesday’s discussion showed a majority of the Planning and Zoning Appeals Board, a citizen advisory group that makes recommendations to elected district commissioners, wants the city to put a stop to SAPs, or at least to drastically alter how they are negotiated in order to ensure more public outreach and consideration for the area’s housing needs.
The vote indicated the resolution will likely be a formality. The board wants to send the message to Miami’s elected commissioners that they need to consider a significant policy change that could alter the future of large-scale redevelopment in the city and the neighborhoods that could feel the impacts.
The SAP zoning category allows developers who own nine or more contiguous acres to trade community benefits — new public spaces, streets, lighting, or cash for other public projects — for the right to build taller and more densely. It’s a trade-off intended to allow city planners to work with developers to encourage thoughtful new construction that can be woven into the fabric of the surrounding area while providing new public amenities.
Brickell City Centre was built under the zoning category, and it is often cited as a prime example of the kind of SAP that makes sense in the context of the urban core.
As these types of proposals moved away from Miami’s densest areas and into residential enclaves, people raised concerns over the prospect of towering, out-of-scale developments moving into the neighborhood — along with the gentrification they would accelerate.
A few proposals in recent years have incited pushback from neighboring communities, particularly in Little Haiti and the Upper East Side, where multiple plans were proposed for tracts of land in close proximity.
At a particularly heated zoning board hearing in October, a lawyer representing SPV Realty and Justin Podolsky, the New York-based developer behind the massive Eastside Ridge project in Little Haiti, pressed the board to deny the special area plan so it could proceed to the city commission.
Vicky Leiva, a partner at Bilzin Sumberg, argued this was the fifth time the 22-acre project — which would wipe out 500 occupied apartments on Northeast 50th Street and Second Avenue — was before the board and another deferment would be a “violation of the due process and delay.”
But zoning board member Anthony Parrish said Leiva admitted her client had no intention to meet the board’s suggestions for further community outreaches and a fresh traffic impact analysis, because their role is only advisory.
“If they want to sue us, that is their right,” Parrish said in October. “And it is our right to do what’s best for the city of Miami.”
On Nov. 20, SPV filed a lawsuit against the zoning board in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, asking the court to compel the board to approve or deny the Eastside Ridge SAP so it could make its way to a vote by the City Commission.
The divisive debate earlier this year over another project, the Magic City Innovation District, illustrated a deep concern over the impact the 18-acre mini-city will have on the rapidly gentrifying Little Haiti.
In January, the board will consider a resolution that formalizes the recommendation to the City Commission, which ultimately has the power to make the change.
“I think we should just stop SAPs,” said Charles Garavaglia, chairman of the planning board. “I think the message has to be strong and draconian. It’s tearing certain areas of the city apart.”
The board heard more than an hour of testimony from community members who advocated for getting rid of SAPs, or at least a moratorium on accepting applications for special area plans so the city could revise the rules that govern them.
“The SAPs have been a gateway to gentrification unlike any other,” said Adrian Madriz, executive director of nonprofit Struggle for Miami’s Affordable and Sustainable Housing.
An attorney who represents multiple developers who have won approvals for SAPs cautioned the board against making a drastic recommendation.
“If you’re going to make changes, do it gingerly,” said Neisen Kasdin, who has represented the developers behind the Magic City project, Brickell City Centre and the Design District, which was revitalized with an SAP.
It was clear that a majority of the board, which has heard hours of public outcry over these types of projects, was ready to make the recommendation to repeal Wednesday night. A city attorney told the board it needed to have a formal resolution before it to do that, so the board is expected to vote on the resolution in January.
“The vote reflects a mounting frustration with runaway development in Miami, and how it has failed to be responsive to the needs and concerns of the community,” said Meena Jagannath, an attorney and co-founder of the Community Justice Project. “It sends a strong important message to the commission that our system is simply not working for the vast majority of our residents who are struggling to pay for their housing and are seeing their neighborhoods disappear in front of their eyes.”
Some experts argue that doing away with SAPs altogether might backfire, allowing developers to build small projects willy-nilly, without taking the surrounding neighborhood into account.
“Under the current requirements, you have to give up 5% of your nine acres to civic uses above and beyond open spaces,” said Iris Escarra, co-chair of the Miami land development and zoning practice at the law firm GreenbergTraurig. “You have to update the infrastructure and are required to provide police and paramedic hubs if the size of the project triggers a large enough increase in population.
“If you get rid of SAPs, you don’t have any master planning, so a developer just builds what they want,” she said. “Brickell City Centre included a fire station and improvements to the Metromover station. Adding criteria that requires real workshops between developers, planners and communities would be a much better solution that a complete repeal.”
Planning board members and activists agreed that if SAPs were to remain, the rules need to be rewritten to create a broader platform for residents to be heard, bolster public benefit requirements and force city planners to take a more holistic view of how these projects are developed in relation to each other, from proximity to other SAPs to traffic and other impact studies.
Whether or not to eliminate SAPs from the code is as political a decision as the approvals of SAPs themselves, which come with lobbying and deal making — some of which plays out in public hearings, and some of which happens behind closed doors. Once a proposal leaves the planning board, it falls in the laps of commissioners who could shape the final product with or without public input. In the case of the Magic City SAP, district Commissioner Keon Hardemon quietly negotiated a $31 million community aid package with developers, a move that frustrated both opponents and supporters of the deal because they found out about it at the start of a public hearing before an initial vote.
All five of the commissioners could end up weighing a decision that will impact the bottom line of a significant base of their political support. In Miami, campaigns are fueled by moneyed interests in real estate, architecture, construction and the lawyers that represent them. Commissioner Ken Russell, who won reelection in November, and newly elected Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla both enjoyed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of support from these sectors.
This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 11:07 AM.
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