The City of Miami and Dragonfly Investments have salvaged a stalled effort to build affordable housing on Mundy Street in the West Grove using federal dollars.
A Miami-based real estate investment group is planning to build eight new units of affordable housing on Mundy Street in the West Grove, bringing some much-needed housing relief to low-income residents of the Little Bahamas neighborhood.
The proposed project salvages an earlier development deal that the City of Miami struck with Casa Valentina, an organization that provides support and training for at-risk and former foster care youth who are seeking to live on their own.
Dragonfly Investments approached Casa Valentina and the City of Miami after the earlier affordable housing project stalled in September 2023.
With a financial assist from the city, Dragonfly is now poised to deliver eight affordable rental apartments on two parcels of land just steps away from South Dixie Highway.
The Mundy Street project expands Dragonfly’s portfolio of housing projects in the West Grove. The company, whose real estate holdings include retail centers, office spaces, and storage facilities, is working with Greater St. Paul A.M.E. Church to build 10 units of affordable housing on Hibiscus Street.
The eight apartments planned for 3121 and 3173 Mundy Street will each have three bedrooms and 1,320 square feet of living space.
The apartments will be reserved for Miami residents making 80% or less of the area median income (the AMI for a two-person household in Miami is $90,800; 80% of that would be $72,640, according to the City of Miami’s website).
As part of the project, Dragonfly also plans to restore the 1926 coral rock home at 3173 Mundy to serve as an entrance lobby for four of the apartments, which will be built behind the historic structure.
Miami District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo’s office is backing the project, which comes at a critical time for the West Grove.
The Bahamian community that settled the neighborhood in the 1880s and helped to build the City of Miami has been buffeted in recent years by rising property values and gentrification. Low-income residents are being priced out of the neighborhood, and the area is in danger of losing its Black identity and history as a result.
Case Valentina had sought to build 50 rental apartments on Mundy Street. The City of Miami approved two loans to advance the project, including $2 million in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the federal stimulus package passed in 2021.
Casa Valentina had used about $1.1 million of the ARPA funding by the time the project stalled in September 2023. Dragonfly will now assume the ARPA loan to develop the two Mundy Street properties that Casa Valentina had acquired in 2022.
“We essentially re-engineered the deal,” Pardo’s chief of staff Anthony Balzebre told the Spotlight. Without the new project, the city would have had to repay the federal government the $2 million in ARPA funding it previously committed to Case Valentina.
In addition to the loan support from the city, the Dragonfly project is being financed with a $1.5 million private bank loan and about $436,000 in investor equity.
With project financing in place, Dragonfly Investment will now seek design approval for the proposed renovation of the 1926 home from the city’s Historic and Environmental Preservation Board and the state’s historical review board.
“That coral rock house is deemed historic, so nothing there could ever be demolished,” Amanda De Seta, the head of development at Dragonfly, told the city’s Housing and Commercial Loan Committee during a hearing earlier this year.
The committee approved the re-engineered deal on October 29.
“I am excited about this project because I am going to take the coral rock house and turn it into the lobby of the four affordable units behind it, so we can have an adaptive reuse project for affordable housing,” De Seta added.
De Seta told committee members she is confident Dragonfly can win the design approvals needed to move forward. “I am trying to work very carefully and thoughtfully, so that we can get approvals on the historic side of this project,” she said.
De Seta told the committee that she had successfully negotiated the state’s historic approval process for the Greater St. Paul project.
“That is a separate project,” De Seta said. “We are working through our permitting on those 10 units, so we are soon going to activate those jobs as well.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with more current information about area median income (AMI) in the city of Miami.
