Little Haiti Caught Up In Gentrification

By Erik Bojnansky, Miami Times Senior Writer

Aug 3, 2021

Buena Vista Gardens, a 2.2-acre apartment complex in Little Haiti, was recently purchased for $11.6 million, a sign that the neighborhood continues to gentrify, even as a pandemic rages across the Sunshine State.

Bowery Properties, headed by real estate investor Thomas Neary, bought the complex at 5601 NW 1st Ave. on July 23, 2021, at a rate of just over $130,000 a door, said Skyler Marinoff of Dwntwn Realty Advisors, who brokered the deal. The seller is Secamar LLC, which purchased the property in March 2014 for $4.4 million. Secamar is managed by Ziad Raphael, the founding broker of Manage Miami Realty, and Carlos, Martha and Carmen Sesin.

No one from Bowery Properties returned a phone call to The Miami Times by deadline. Marinoff, however, said it was Buena Vista’s 89 apartment units that made it an attractive purchase. Most buildings in Little Haiti have far fewer.

“In Little Haiti you (usually) have single family homes, or four-to-10-unit buildings,” Marinoff explained, and later added that “… It makes it a rarity to find a property this size.”

Bigger projects are coming to the area.

Less than a mile away from Buena Vista Gardens, a team of real estate developers aim to build the Magic City Innovation District, a 15-acre miniature city near NE 60th Street and 2nd Avenue consisting of 2,630 market-rate apartment units, 432 hotel rooms, 2.7 million square feet of office and retail space, and about 120,000 square feet of exposition space in buildings up to 25 stories tall. Once zoned for light industrial and modest residential development, the properties received a massive upzoning from the Miami City Commission in June 2019.

The owners of Design Place at 5045 NE 2nd Ave. want a zoning increase, too. They want to gradually replace the 512-unit complex of two-story apartment buildings with Sabal Palm Village, a sprawling realm of 2,929 apartment units, a 400-room hotel, a vocational school, and just over 464,000 square feet of offices and retail spaces. Located just outside Little Haiti, Design Place is also less than a mile from Buena Vista Gardens.

Marinoff noted the prospect of large-scale development in Little Haiti in a news release announcing Buena Vista Gardens’ sale.

Haitian activist Leonie Hermantin worries that big transactions like Buena Vista Gardens will make it more expensive for Little Haiti’s current residents to stay where they are.

(Erik Bojnansky for The Miami Times)

“Little Haiti is seeing significant multifamily investment activity in conjunction with the neighborhood’s overall expansion,” Marinoff crowed in the release. “Large-scale development in the pipeline for Little Haiti and surrounding neighborhoods will further fuel investor interest.”

Bowery Properties purchased Buena Vista Gardens partly because of security features like fencing and cameras.

(Erik Bojnansky for The Miami Times)

Indeed, real estate investors have been snatching up properties in Little Haiti and Little River for years, seeing it as a cheap alternative to adjacent neighborhoods like Wynwood, the Design District and the Upper Eastside.

Leonie Hermantin, director of development, communications and strategic planning for the Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, said she’s concerned that such real estate transactions will further increase the cost of living and displace more families.

“[Buena Vista Gardens] is in a neighborhood that is 86% renter occupied,” she said. “Renters there are extremely vulnerable.”

Consisting of 12 low-rise apartment buildings constructed between 1947 and 1969 and a single-family home, the monthly rents at Buena Vista Gardens range from just under $900 to over $1,300, Marinoff said.

He explained that Neary’s plans for the apartment complex are modest, since the previous landowners had already installed a fence around the perimeter as well as security lighting and cameras.

“[The property] is very self-sustaining,” Marinoff said.

Bowery Properties’ Thomas Neary saw Buena Vista Gardens as a “self-sustaining” investment.

(Erik Bojnansky for The Miami Times)

A lot of the units have been renovated as well, Marinoff added, though Neary intends to continue upgrading the apartments.

“As tenants decide to leave,” he said, “the new owners will continue to renovate the units as they turn over.”

Rents will go up, too, though not drastically, according to Marinoff.

“We’re looking at $50 to $100 a month (rent increases) for the units that are older,” he said.

Marinoff also pointed out that Neary is hardly new to the area and was investing in Little Haiti long before the Magic City Innovation District was even a blip.

“[Neary] has probably been in the neighborhood for 10 years,” he said, and that during that time has accumulated a “really nice portfolio.”

But sometimes Neary sells off parts of that portfolio.

Buena Vista Gardens consists of 13 buildings constructed between 1947 and 1969.

(Dwntwn Realty Advisors)

Last June, Bowery Properties sold 35 houses and 11 apartment buildings Neary owned in Little Haiti to North Miami Beach real estate firm Global Horizons for $12.85 million, according to The Real Deal. Guy Goldberg, co-founder of Global Horizons, told The Real Deal that he plans to renovate the properties and hasn’t decided if he will raise the rents for the properties or sell them off.

One tenant, who did not wish to be named, said there are rumors amongst his neighbors that monthly rents could go up by $300, but “even $50 or $100 is a lot.”

Additionally, Bowery Properties has created a stir by changing how tenants must pay their rent – cash is no longer accepted at the management office. Instead, renters are to make payments online via a software program called Appfolio, according to a notice posted on an office door. Renters are divided on their opinions of this new method, the anonymous tenant told Miami Times.

“Those who are tech-savvy like it,” he said. “Those who aren’t, hate it.”

Henry James Davis, a resident of Buena Vista Gardens for 12 years, is philosophical about the new payment system, and about the prospect of higher rents.

“You just got to get used to it,” he said.

The Miami Times is the largest Black-owned newspaper in the south serving Miami's Black community since 1923. The award-winning weekly is frequently recognized as the best Black newspaper in the country by the National Newspaper Publishers Association.