One developer is seeking to build a 20-story mixed-income apartment building on Douglas Road. Community leaders have concerns.
A Miami developer is seeking to build a 20-story apartment building on public land at the corner of Douglas Road and Day Avenue near South Dixie Highway as part of larger effort to redevelop nine county-owned public housing properties in the West Grove.
The mixed-income project would replace a three-story building at Stirrup Plaza that now houses 65 Section 8 apartments for seniors. The county invited developers to bid on the redevelopment project last year by issuing a request-for-proposal (RFP).
Two developers – Related Urban and Integral Florida – were chosen last month to begin negotiations with Miami-Dade County to lead a redevelopment effort that will stretch across three blocks of Douglas Road from Oak Avenue north to South Dixie Highway.
Albert Milo, president of Related Urban, told residents last week that the company plans to take advantage of new county zoning rules that allow developers to build taller residential buildings near Metrorail stations (in this case, the Douglas Road station).
Preliminary plans call for a 20-story building with 345 housing units, including a one-for-one replacement of the existing 65 units, an additional 46 subsidized apartments for seniors, and 62 “workforce” units reserved for low- and moderate-income families.
The remaining apartments – 172 in total – will be priced to market. “It is a mixed-income project, and it is also multi-generational,” Milo said last week during a community presentation hosted by District 7 County Commissioner Raquel Regalado.
Related Urban was the only developer to bid on the Stirrup Plaza site.
The company previously was chosen by the county to rebuild the Liberty Square housing project in Liberty City, a massive effort that roiled an entire community and that ultimately became the subject of a searing documentary, Razing Liberty Square.
The proposed project on Douglas Road, called Gallery in the Grove, would be more than twice as tall as the Platform 3750 apartment building across the street, which has eight stories and 191 apartments.
After listening to Milo’s presentation, community leaders expressed concern about the impact of the project on a neighborhood where single family homes predominate.
“Tentatively, it is all under negotiation. I don’t think anything is fixed in cement, but 20 stories, that is really taking it to another level,” Reynold Martin, chairman of GRACE (Grove Rights and Community Equity) in Coconut Grove, told the Spotlight.
Martin said he also doubted whether residents of the West Grove, a historically Black neighborhood, would benefit if the project’s affordable housing units are offered through a lottery system open to all county residents, as federal housing rules require.
“I don’t think the intent is to accommodate a lot of our elders,” he said. “They would have to do a lottery and we never do well in lottery, because of the numbers.”
Alex Ballina, director of Miami-Dade Public Housing and Community Development, said the county’s goal in redeveloping existing public housing sites like those in the West Grove is to increase the county’s stock of affordable housing.
“What we do with these redevelopments is we utilize our existing buildings that we have and we take advantage of the opportunity to use the densities that are allowed to us, for us to build more affordable housing,” he told residents during last week’s forum.
Integral Florida, the company negotiating to redevelop eight other public housing properties on two adjacent blocks, declined to share details of its plans last week when residents and the Spotlight requested more information.
There are currently 24 two-story housing units on those properties, according to the county’s RFP, including 16 three-bedroom and eight four-bedroom homes. Integral was one of three bidders that submitted proposals to the county for those properties.
“Nothing we have proposed to the county is set in stone. We will have a listening ear and be paying attention to the community” Kareem Brantley, principal of Integral’s Florida division, said last week.
Those eight properties share the same Rapid Transit Zone (RTZ) zoning as the property where Related Urban is planning to build, Regalado told the Spotlight.
The commissioner said Integral and the county are negotiating over the number of units to be built on those eight properties, which in turn will determine the height of any new development. “That’s my understanding of where Integral is at,” she said.
West Grove residents have previously expressed concern about the size and density of the redevelopment project.
“I live in an adjacent single-family home. Will the project designer consider that homeowners do not want the project to have an overwhelming effect on the existing neighborhood, especially since there is a call for more density,” Clarice Cooper asked in April during a community meeting.
Regalado has pledged to keep West Grove residents briefed on the details of the project and to take neighborhood concerns into account before finalizing plans, but some are skeptical of the process.
Asked about last week’s briefing, Martin said, “What was troubling is that they do negotiations, and then they will come and have community engagement, which means that the community engagement may not have impact, because it will come after negotiations.”
Ballina and Regalado have said repeatedly that all public housing tenants whose homes are replaced as part of the redevelopment effort will be guaranteed new housing when the project is complete.
“There will be no displacement of residents that currently live at the communities that we are redeveloping,” Ballina said.
That has become a flash point in the redevelopment of Liberty Square, where residents were offered rental vouchers to relocate during construction. Many chose not to return, resulting in permanent displacement and the fragmentation of a community.
The county’s RFP for the West Grove requires the selected developers to embrace a phased redevelopment effort that avoids displacing residents, even temporarily.
“Residents of the project sites, to the greatest extent possible, should not be temporarily relocated off-site during construction. They should be able to move from their existing housing units to new units, once completed in phases at the project sites,” the RFP states. If residents have to move temporarily, the selected developers will be required to bear “all costs,” according to the RFP.
Once existing residents are placed in new housing, any additional subsidized housing units will be filled through a lottery system. Under federal housing rules, that lottery system will prioritize county residents, but not neighborhood residents.
West Grove residents have protested that rule. Regalado has said she will lobby federal housing officials to waive the rule for the West Grove, a community where many residents have been displaced in recent years due to gentrification.
When the Platform 3750 building opened, Regalado’s office helped neighborhood residents to participate in a lottery for 79 affordable housing units in that building. Community leaders say the results were disappointing.
Regalado has pledged to provide the same support for this new project, if HUD declines to waive the rules and a lottery system is used. “We will be providing that assistance. Our office will help with the application fees and with the nuts and bolts of the application, as well as a case worker, just like we did in the past. That is our commitment to the community,” Regalado told residents last week.
