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Posted May 26, 2021, 4:28 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
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Meet The New Miami: A Series Of Self-Sustaining, Interconnected Villages
Meet The New Miami: A Series Of Self-Sustaining, Interconnected Villages
May 23, 2021
By Andres Viglucci and Rene Rodriguez
Read More: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/bus...250723159.html
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Not so long ago, Miami-Dade was a story of east, the sprawling Beach and a mainland of undifferentiated suburbs, centered by a central business district that shut down at 5 p.m. Today the county increasingly is coalescing around a series of urban villages or centers, compact, pedestrian-friendly places where people can live, shop or dine out, even work or go to school, with few or mercifully short trips by car. Some Miamians are even choosing what once seemed unthinkable in a metro that for decades has been designed and built around the automobile forgoing car ownership entirely.
- The urban villages have spread well beyond the pioneering, now famous neighborhoods like Brickell and South Beach, long the only choices for those seeking dense, urban and walkable places to live in Miami-Dade. Today the urban centers comprise resurgent or gentrifying city neighborhoods like Wynwood, North Beach, Coconut Grove and Overtown, as well as old-line suburbs like Coral Gables, North Miami and even Sweetwater that are fast retooling themselves as magnets for urban living. They also include brand new, intensively pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods that have sprung into thriving existence in the span of a few years, like Midtown Miami and Downtown Dadeland. — The trend, residents and experts say, is driven not just by many Miamians’ desire to live free of punishing automobile commutes, but to enjoy the urban amenities of a downtown, village center or a traditional main street close to home. Some say it’s also providing a sense of connection or local identity that’s often missing in sprawling, auto-dominated Miami, where the car sometimes seems to be the only thing linking far-flung communities and the people who live in them.
- Housing affordability plays a role. While a typical condo in Brickell costs $450,000, a typical mid-priced home in Doral costs around $370,000, according to Zillow. Still, residents in cities like Doral once seen as far-flung outposts crave a sense of place. They find it in its small-town center, with offices, two public charter schools, Doral city hall, a Main Street with service and retail shops and casual and fine-dining restaurants, a new public library, and an urban-footprint Publix supermarket. The range of housing is unusually broad., including high-rise condos and apartments, townhomes and single-family houses, all connected by pedestrian green ways to the Main Street district. — Some contend the proliferation of urban villages across the county could even help reverse a persistent brain drain in which the most talented young Miamians may leave for college or jobs elsewhere, often lured by the chance to experience urban living in older, more traditional cities like New York, Boston or Seattle. In part, they say, the choice to leave is driven by the high cost of owning a car, typically a minimum of $8,000 a year, which adds to the financial burden of rising residential costs in Miami.
- Even some places that don’t fit the urban paradigm are getting in the game. In Kendall, a sprawling auto-centric agglomeration of subdivisions dominated by strip malls and chain retail stores, residents can now enjoy hip dining and drinking spots operated by celebrated chefs, one-of-a-kind small businesses like an apothecary/used book store, and unique attractions such as a giant ice skating rink or a video-game arcade a taste of urban life without having to drive all the way to Wynwood or South Beach. — And in the agricultural Redland, whose rural character is protected by the invisible urban development boundary that buffers it from suburbia, is no longer just farms, nurseries and estates. A growing number of agri-tourism ventures have expanded amenities for residents with otherwise little appetite for the perks of urban life. But longtime residents and small farmers say they’re worried about increasing development pressure.“Redland is a treasure,” said Sidney Robinson, owner of Sandy Acre Avocado and Mango Farm and a third-generation farmer in the area. “We that live in Redland want to preserve the UDB for future generations.”
Examples abound, some more obvious than others:
City officials and developers in Coral Gables have been retrofitting its once-sleepy downtown, long a regional employment center, into a denser mecca for living, working, culture and entertainment, though not without some pushback from longtime residents worried about erosion of the city’s historic low-scale ambience.
▪ After decades of broken promises and failed redevelopment schemes, Miami’s historic Overtown is enjoying a resurgence as a center for Black life and culture.
▪ Sweetwater has reinvented its tiny downtown, which sits across Southwest Eighth Street from FIU in West Miami-Dade, as an urban village for students and faculty, providing an alternative to commuting to campus by car.
▪ In Homestead, once a rural small town transformed into a bedroom community, leaders are reviving its historic but perennially distressed main street along Krome Avenue as a center of local life.
▪ Young families are flocking to Miami’s tree-lined, historic Coral Way, the spine that threads together older city neighborhoods like The Roads, Shenandoah and Coral Gate. They are forgoing big suburban yards and malls for small house lots, walkable and bikeable streets and the little restaurants, barber shops, doctor’s offices and a smattering of big chains on Coral Way.
▪ North Miami, a formerly white suburb that’s today majority Haitian and Haitian American, is kicking off ambitious plans to revamp its humanly scaled but under-performing main street along Northeast 125th Street as a denser urban center with a $15 million investment in a planned $86 million residential development mixing affordable and market rate-housing. The city is also seeing the redevelopment of a onetime landfill on the edge of Biscayne Bay into Solé Mia, a massive project that will create a mini-city of apartments and commercial development around an artificial lake.
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