Building boom hits north end of Miami Beach. Will residents benefit — or suffer?
Ten years ago, a master plan was unveiled to reimagine North Beach, the most affordable, least gentrified slice of Miami Beach that stretches from 63rd Street to 87th Terrace.
Now, the neighborhood’s transformation is entering top gear.
Numerous projects are underway within a “Town Center” that was rezoned in 2018 to allow bigger buildings. A dozen developments are planned or have been completed in the rezoned area from 69th to 72nd Street between Indian Creek Drive and Collins Avenue, according to a map provided by the city.
More than 1,300 residential units are coming, along with ground-floor retail, hotel rooms and parking garages.
The changes are impossible to miss.
A 22-story luxury condo building that allows short-term rentals, 72 Park, opened last year. Five nearby projects are under construction. And more are on the way, both inside and outside the formal Town Center.
The Byron Carlyle, a defunct movie theater on 71st Street, is set to be reborn as a cultural arts center. A parking lot on 72nd Street across from the Miami Beach Bandshell is slated to house a community center. Ocean Terrace, currently home to shuttered motels and a new beachfront park at 74th Street, will see condo and hotel towers. Farther south, David Martin’s Terra Group will redevelop the former site of the Deauville Hotel.
READ MORE: Welcome to ‘real’ North Beach. Is the anti-South Beach finally ready for prime time?
The rapid transformation after years of planning is something to celebrate, said Russell Galbut, one of the top developers in Miami Beach whose firm, Crescent Heights, is involved in several North Beach projects.
“We’re really building something special in North Beach,” Galbut told the Miami Herald. “This rejuvenation is going to be second to none.”
As part of discussions years ago, community members and city officials agreed on a trade-off: While taller buildings would be allowed in the Town Center, other areas of North Beach with mostly low-rise apartments would receive new historic designations to protect them from demolition.
Still, some are worried about potential negative impacts of the construction boom, including the possibility that gentrification will push out full-time residents of North Beach, a largely working-class neighborhood.
The new units aren’t income-restricted, and short-term rentals are allowed in the Town Center to attract snowbirds and tourists. And while the rezoning meant that many of the new residential units coming to the area would be relatively small “co-living” units between 375 and 550 square feet, even those can be expensive.
At 72 Park, the smallest units are 470 square feet, with prices starting at $700,000, according to a fact sheet.
“Will our residents be able to find housing affordability in these new developments?” said Miami Beach Commissioner Alex Fernandez, who was first elected in 2021. “Or was the zoning done for people to come and invest and not live in Miami Beach, but profit from our community at the expense of the quality of life of the residents of our city who are struggling to live here?”
Fernandez said he fears the area’s “already strained, aging” infrastructure won’t be able to keep up with the pace of development. North Beach is next in line on the city’s list of major anti-flooding projects.
But Galbut said he believes those issues can be addressed through the North Beach Community Redevelopment Agency, a special district where property tax growth will go toward investment in the neighborhood.
“We’re going to be able to self-fund an entire infrastructure in North Beach,” Galbut said.
READ MORE: North Beach looked like that? See hotels, homes and restaurants from the early days
Still, Manning Salazar, a North Beach resident who serves on an advisory board for the Community Redevelopment Agency, said he and others who helped shape the city’s master plan feel like their priorities have been cast aside.
The 2016 plan contemplated buildings up to 125 feet tall in the Town Center. The rezoning approved by city officials two years later allowed for buildings up to 220 feet.
Salazar added that the new developments coming to North Beach appear to be aimed at “high-income” buyers and feature short-term rentals geared toward a transient population.
“We don’t want to lose the character of our neighborhood,” Salazar said. “We want development that’s going to fit in more organically with the rest of the city and maintain the makeup of the residents as much as possible.”
Amid the construction and population growth, traffic is also a concern. On the blocks surrounding 71st Street, major backups have become common during rush hour.
Even the city’s police chief has felt the effects. At an April 22 City Commission meeting, Chief Wayne Jones said that on a recent Thursday around 5:30 p.m., it took him almost an hour to drive eight blocks from the 63rd Street bridge to 71st Street on Indian Creek Drive.
Commissioner Tanya Katzoff Bhatt said at the meeting that, while developers are required to conduct traffic studies for new projects, no one is looking at the issue holistically.
“That screws over the residents,” Bhatt said, citing the number of projects coming to North Beach. “When you aggregate them together, [it] destroys the limited space that we have.”
Bhatt, a North Beach resident since 2016 who was elected in 2023, said the city ceded too much control to developers when the 2018 rezoning was approved.
Outside the Town Center, Bhatt pointed to the Deauville and Ocean Terrace projects as examples of developers working closely with the city and residents to provide substantial community benefits. But inside the rezoned area, she said, the city is now unable to control a wave of development that is likely to strain affordability, infrastructure, traffic and parking.
“The way this was done has had such deleterious consequences that I don’t believe were anticipated, and there’s no way to mitigate for them,” Bhatt told the Herald.
Galbut, the developer, said critiques of the neighborhood’s overhaul come from a “minority of people who really have loud voices” and praised the elected officials who approved the plan years ago.
Even the naysayers would admit that North Beach is “becoming a special community,” Galbut said.
“When a place starts to become magical, everybody jumps in,” he said. “We made South Beach a magical place. They’re doing the same in North Beach.”
This story was originally published May 8, 2026 at 11:28 AM.
