The developers behind three apartment projects in the West Grove are planning a fourth project – a four-story office building on Grand Avenue. Community leaders express frustration.
A trio of development partners with three separate projects and 248 market-rate apartments under development in the West Grove are planning to build a fourth project that will bring new office space and more retail activity to a desolate stretch of Grand Avenue.
The partners plan to begin marketing the project – called 3443 Grand – to prospective commercial tenants this week. Construction is slated to begin next year, with an estimated completion date in the spring of 2026.
The proposed four-story building will stretch across six vacant properties on the north side of Grand Avenue between Hibiscus and Elizabeth Streets, with 80,000 square feet of Class A office space, two ground-floor retail locations, covered parking, and three elevated terraces on the back of the building looking north to Florida Avenue.
The project is a partnership between Coconut Grove developers Grant Savage and Peter Gardner at Silver Bluff Development, and Abbhi Capital, a Miami investment firm.
“We think there is a very big demand for Class A office space, for all the people who live here” in Coconut Grove and for those further south, Savage said, explaining why he and his partners chose to build office space instead of housing with this project.
The L-shaped building designed by Arquitectonica will wrap the corner of Grand and Hibiscus with a stone-and-glass façade and Caribbean-style eaves that nod to the neighborhood’s Bahamian roots.
To the north, the project will back up to four single-family homes that share the same block but front on Florida Avenue. None of the owners could be reached at home on Monday, and did not respond to written interview requests this week.
Jimmy Sinis, director of design at Silver Bluff, said the development will include landscaped buffers between the project, the four residences and Florida Avenue. “We’ve done everything we can to push away (to) respect the neighbors,” he said.
A large oak tree on the building site will be moved to a vacant lot between two of the houses to create one buffer, identified as “Oak Park” in marketing materials. “We started maintaining this tree after we bought this property. We’re going to move it to Florida Avenue and create a buffer,” Savage said.
Additionally, a specimen tree from a sister development site across the street will be moved to the 3443 Grand site to anchor the building’s entrance, Sinis said.
Savage and his partners previously announced plans for two mixed-use residential projects on the south side of Grand Avenue – the Atala project between Hibiscus and Plaza Street with 175 apartments and ground-floor retail, and the smaller Elemi Phase 2 project on the former Bain-Range Funeral Services site with 27 apartments.
A third project, Elemi Phase 1 with 46 apartments, is nearing completion at the corner of Thomas Avenue and Margaret Street, behind the Coconut Grove Farmer’s market.
The four projects are spread over three blocks on Grand Avenue that were once part of a proposed six-block mixed-use development known as Grove Village.
The City of Miami approved a major use special permit (MUSP) in 2011 to greenlight the massive project, which Gardner was proposing at the time, but the development effort stalled amid a building moratorium and an economic downturn.
Many of the older multi-family apartment buildings that lined that stretch of Grand Avenue were torn down nonetheless, displacing long-term residents.
Eighteen individual properties on five of those blocks today are the subject of an unfair housing complaint brought against the City of Miami in 2023 by three West Grove community groups and one former resident.
The complaint contends that the City of Miami incentivized developers to displace 162 or more African-American residents from those properties when it approved the MUSP and a new citywide zoning code known as Miami 21. The U.S. Department of Housing opened an investigation into the complaint in July of this year.
“What I witnessed was heartbreaking because people had to move away. We lost a lot of residents as a result, which has been reflected in our local church membership, and also in our schools,” Clarice Cooper told the Spotlight in a recent interview.
Cooper is the president of the Coconut Grove Village West Homeowners and Tenants Association, one of the three organizations behind the complaint.
“That’s what made it (Grand Avenue) seem like a ghost town,” she said.
Three of the West Grove projects under development by Savage and his partners will bring housing back to Grand Avenue, but community groups fear that the market-rate apartments will be too expensive for many current and former West Grove residents.
“These places will never be occupied by the villagers that I came to know as my friends and neighbors. So yes, it dismays me,” Reynold Martin, the chairman of GRACE (Grove Rights and Community Equity), said this week.
“They say we should always keep hope alive, and it (the development now coming to Grand Avenue) kind of dampens that hope, but I will still keep hope alive,” he added.
Savage previously told the Spotlight he is working with other partners to finance an affordable housing project in the West Grove that, if successful, would provide housing at below-market rates for West Grove residents.
“We are still actively pursuing that,” he said last week.
Looks like a down-market west Boca office park.
Gentrification is definitely a complex and painful process, especially in areas like West Grove where the identity and culture of the community are deeply rooted. It’s frustrating to see how local residents, who have lived and worked in Miami for generations, are being pushed out in favor of wealthier transplants who can afford to live there due to higher salaries from out-of-state companies. This shift in housing and economic patterns does feel like the City of Miami is catering more to this influx rather than addressing the needs of long-term residents.
It’s a tough dynamic, especially when neighborhoods that once held so much history and character are transformed to accommodate a different demographic that may not have the same connection to the area. It feels like a piece of Miami is being sold off bit by bit, and that can be incredibly disheartening for those who call it home. Thank you City of Miami Commissioners for looking out for the Miami people and not your own pockets!