A supersized, mixed-use project at the site of a struggling Sears store on Coral Way is possible thanks to a new state law that preempts local zoning regulations. Nearby residents say their “jewel” of a neighborhood will never be the same.
Longtime residents of Miami’s Coral Gate neighborhood – a 460-home enclave a mile or so north of Coconut Grove – see their community as a refuge from the city’s commotion and traffic-clogged streets. With modest homes, well-kept lawns and the absence of through streets, the place has a quaint and quiet small-town vibe.
“We’ve put a lot of effort into having what we call a jewel in Miami. It’s so close to everything. But we have a lot of privacy because we’ve worked very hard to put up barricades and walls around the neighborhood to keep it quiet,” Maria Doval, president of the Coral Gate Homeowners Association, says.
For those hoping to keep high-density development out of Coral Gate, unwelcome change may be afoot, however.
Last summer Miami’s Urban Development Review Board approved plans for three eight-story towers at the site of South Florida’s last remaining Sears retail store at the corner of Coral Way and SW 37th Avenue.
The project, which includes 1,050 residential units and more than 40,000 square feet of commercial space, is significantly larger than what’s allowed under Miami’s land-use regulations for the area, but the developers are taking advantage of a new state law – the Live Local Act – to sidestep local zoning codes.
While the Live Local Act has been praised for helping to address Florida’s housing crisis by spurring (and fast-tracking) development, critics say its blanket provisions overriding local zoning rules unfairly burden communities like Coral Gate, which must contend with increased traffic, noise, building height and other pressures brought on by higher densities.
The act’s provisions also allow projects to circumvent planning board meetings, commission oversight, and public notice requirements that would otherwise accompany large-scale developments.
Doval, a retired nurse who has lived here since 1988, is blunt in her indictment of the new law, saying it will “destroy what we have in Coral Gate.”
Enacted in July 2023, the Live Local Act has been promoted as an aggressive, multi-pronged bill to address the state’s housing crisis.
Supporters maintain that it will help create a wave of workforce housing near new job centers. Projects fast-tracked under the law must have at least 40 percent of residential units designated for households earning 120% or less of area median income, which in Miami-Dade is $136,200 a year for a family of four. The law also caps the rental rate for a one-bedroom apartment at $2,554 per month.
The law was sponsored by Republican State Senator Alexis Calatayud, whose district includes a large chunk of Coconut Grove.
“The biggest housing concern we hear from young people is that there is no place for them to raise their own families in communities they grew up in, where their extended families have lived for generations. That changes today,” Calatayud said in a press release upon the bill’s passage in 2023.
Live Local Act projects have been sprouting up across Miami-Dade County, from Doral to Miami Beach to Wynwood. As in Coral Gate, the backlash has been swift.
Charles Garavaglia, a Coral Gate resident who served as the chair of Miami’s Planning, Zoning & Appeals Board from 2014 to 2023, tells the Spotlight he’s not surprised with the frustration residents are feeling on the front lines of Live Local Act projects, particularly given the latitude provided to developers for bypassing community input.
“The city needs more diverse housing,” says Garavaglia. “But as soon as you let the government remove the voice of the people, you get skepticism, negativity. That’s the core of it: you’ve taken away the opportunity of the citizens to speak up in an environment where they already have a level of doubt about how the city or state runs things.”
In October, after fierce lobbying by Coral Gate residents, the Miami City Commission passed a resolution urging the State of Florida to amend the law to add better protections for single-family residential neighborhoods.
The law was already amended last spring, when lawmakers placed some restrictions on building height for Live Local development sites that border single-family neighborhoods on two or more sides. (Coral Gate borders the Sears development site on one side.)
The eight-acre development parcel, on the south side of the Coral Gate neighborhood, has been home to a Sears store since 1954. It remains one of only a handful of stores nationwide to remain in operation, following a 2022 bankruptcy proceeding.
How long it will remain open is uncertain. On a recent weekday morning visit, store employees seemed to vastly outnumber shoppers. A Sears spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
The one-time retailing giant occupies the space under a lease with the Sunny Isles Beach-based RK Centers, which operates more than 35 commercial plazas in Florida, in addition to a large portfolio of commercial property in New England.
The company, which has not responded to the Spotlight’s request for comment, is controlled by Miami Heat minority owner Raanan Katz.
Under the city’s existing zoning code, redevelopment of the Sears site would be limited to five stories. But a provision of Live Local allows new construction – provided it includes the required affordable housing components – to match the city’s maximum allowable height within a one-mile radius of the site. In this case, that’s at least eight stories.
Another provision of the Live Local Act overrides local zoning so that developers can build to the maximum residential density allowed anywhere in a city’s jurisdiction. For Miami, that’s 1,000 units per acre – far denser than what’s allowed under existing zoning at the Coral Gate site.
The provisions, some critics contend, mean that urban counties, like Miami-Dade, where a range of building heights and densities are common, are feeling far greater development pressure than suburban counties where maximum height and density may rarely exceed two or three stories and a few dozen units per acre.
Miami-Dade is also attracting intense interest from developers due to another Live Local Act component, which allows local governments to extend property tax exemptions to spur new projects – an incentive that less populated counties, with less of a housing crunch, may opt out of offering, says Hollie Croft, a land-use attorney who advises commercial developers.
Despite calls for state lawmakers to better insulate single-family neighborhoods, like Coral Gate, from high density development, Croft adds that the act fulfills its intent: preventing the “not-in-my-backyard” mentality from stifling new affordable housing.
Indeed, the act steers state funding to support affordable housing initiatives: nearly $260 million for the State Apartment Incentive Loan (SAIL) program and $252 million for the State Housing Initiatives Partnership (SHIP). The law also earmarked $100 million to the Hometown Heroes Program for downpayment assistance.
Ralph Rosado, an urban planning consultant and Coral Gate resident, says that while the Florida legislature was right to take broad action on the housing crisis, the new law unfairly impacts – through declines in both livability and property values – the pockets of low-density communities within larger urban areas like Miami.
Rosado notes that along with Coconut Grove, Coral Gate is the only Miami community with its own Neighborhood Conservation District zoning overlay, which provides added protections to its leafy, single-family character and scale.
Doval, the homeowners association president, says Coral Gate has a track record of civic activism. Fifteen years ago, the community lobbied city officials and raised funds to erect a nearly half-mile-long wall around its perimeter – a structure Doval says was a testament to the 70-year-old neighborhood’s commitment to preserve its peace and quiet.
And in 2022 residents rallied in opposition to RK Centers’ earlier effort to develop the Sears site. At one point, hundreds of community members attended a meeting in St. Raymond’s Catholic Church where developers listened to their concerns. After Live Local passed in 2023, RK Centers shifted the project to move forward under the new law.
Today, Doval and other Coral Gate residents feel they’ve lost their ability to sway the fate of developments rising in their backyard. Zoning changes, they say, will be rubber-stamped with no public input and little city oversight. Officials from RK Centers, she says, have stopped returning her calls.
“I’ve been the association president since 2007, and I’ve been on the board much longer than that. This is the first time that I have felt defeated,” Doval says.
“The law was sponsored by Republican State Senator Alexis Calatayud”
Coral Gate, that’s whom you have to thank for harming your neighborhood.
If the Florida Legislature were sincere about affordable housing, instead of gifting developers they would not allow housing purchases by foreign buyers, large investment corporations, and short term rentals.
We live in a pro-development City, in a pro-development County, in a pro-development State. And BIG developers making money from BIG developments are in charge of deciding what gets built by being in charge of who gets elected through their PAC’s. There is no doubt that we are in a “housing crisis” and that high-rise apartment buildings should be one of the components to the solution of that crisis–but not the ONLY solution (sorry for the CAPS). Not everyone wants to live in a high-rise apartment, for example, people with kids and pets, or who just like to be able to step outside and go for a walk without getting into an elevator. In addition to high-rises, we also need more 2 and 3 story apartment buildings, and more ADU “Granny Flats.” We need more “Mews” complexes, and more “courtyard” homes, and many other housing types that you can find being built again around the country. We could bring back the Planned Unit Developments (PUD’s) that were tailored to the needs of each community. Unfortunately, our elected officials have been deceived that the “missing middle” in our housing inventory is only about income levels, like “120% or less of area median income.” It should also be about the “missing middle” of housing types. So far, the path of least resistance from any meaningful public input is to build higher and denser and existing neighborhoods be damned. We can do better!