A highrise housing project approved for the corner of Douglas Road and Day Avenue in the West Grove may be a harbinger of things to come under Miami-Dade County zoning rules that encourage developers to go big when building near Metrorail stations.
The Miami-Dade County Commission approved the 20-story project, known as Gallery in the Grove, without discussion on February 19. The $148 million project is more than twice as tall as the neighboring Platform 3750 apartment building and will dwarf its single-family neighbors to the north when completed.
The project was proposed and approved under new rapid transit zoning (RTZ) rules adopted by the county in September 2022. The rules, which apply countywide, effectively trump existing zoning rules inside municipalities, including the City of Miami.
In the case of Gallery in the Grove, the project will be built on land owned by the county, which will allow the developer – Related Urban Development Group – to pursue a “streamlined” zoning and approval process through the county, not the city.
The Gallery in the Grove project is controversial for several reasons. West Grove community leaders have expressed reservations about the size of the building. A bigger point of contention, however, concerns the fate of the building’s 345 apartments.
Some of those apartments – 173 in total – will be priced below market for low and moderate-income families and seniors. Because the project is subsidized with federal housing dollars, however, residents of the West Grove won’t be given preference. The apartments will be leased through a lottery system open to all county residents.
In the past, notably with the Platform 3750 project across Douglas Road, West Grove residents have not done well in housing lotteries, despite the support and assistance provided by Miami-Dade District 7 Commissioner Raquel Regalado.
When Platform 3750 opened, Regalado’s office helped neighborhood residents apply for the 78 affordable housing units in that building. Community leaders say the results were disappointing. Regalado has pledged to provide the same support again.
The Gallery in the Grove project will replace a three-story building and its 65 subsidized apartments for seniors. The new 20-story building will bring back those 65 units while adding an additional 46 apartments for seniors and 62 “workforce” units reserved for low- and moderate-income families.
Altogether, the county is seeking to redevelop nine publicly-owned housing properties in the West Grove. To start the process, the county issued a request-for-proposal (RFP) in April 2023 inviting developers to compete for the right to redevelop the properties.
Two developers – Related and Integral Florida – were chosen last fall to begin negotiations with Miami-Dade County for a redevelopment effort that will stretch across three blocks of Douglas Road from Oak Avenue to South Dixie Highway.
The Related project, the first to come back to the County Commission, would occupy one property at the corner of Douglas Road and Day Avenue.
Integral Florida was chosen by the county to develop the other eight properties, where there are currently 24 two-story public housing units. Those eight properties share the same Rapid Transit Zone (RTZ) zoning as the property where Related is planning to build, Regalado told the Spotlight.
Integral Florida has declined to discuss its plans for those properties, saying it’s too soon to share details. County officials say the proposed development of those properties – now under negotiation – will be reviewed by the County Commission sometime in April.
Both projects could become early examples of the impact of county RTZ zoning in Coconut Grove.
Under the county’s RTZ regulations, buildings that are in close proximity to the Vizcaya, Coconut Grove and Douglas Road Metrorail stations can top out at 40 stories, if they meet certain criteria set by the county.
(Where exactly this zoning applies in the City of Miami and Coconut Grove is unclear. The code generally states that any area within a half mile of the existing Metrorail or proposed SMART corridors is subject to the RTZ.)
By comparison, under the city’s zoning code, Gallery in the Grove would be capped at five stories (not including any bonus floors permitted by the city under its own zoning rules), which would fall more in line with the single-family homes nearby.
The sudden jump in height is a concern for residents who feel the building would be out of place and cast a literal shadow over their homes. Ruth Ewing lives just a few blocks from the proposed development.
“There’s no gradual increase to it. You have these big things that are just jutting out of the landscape,” she said. “The 20-story building just really seems kind of dramatically off scale.”
Clarice Cooper, another West Grove resident who has followed the proposed development project closely, expressed similar concerns at a community forum last year hosted by Regalado’s District 7 office.
“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,” she asked.
The response? “Yes, absolutely,” said Alex Ballina, director of Housing and Community Development at the county. “All of this goes through what they call the administrative site plan review of the county along with our zoning department.”
Now that the County Commission has negotiated an agreement with Related for Gallery in the Grove, that process – site plan approval – is expected to take six months, according to a timeline prepared by Related, and another eight months to obtain a building permit.
The County Commission approved the new RTZ zoning in September 2022 to address the county’s housing shortage and to encourage more residents to ride public transit.
But Ewing and others question whether the people who move into these taller buildings will stop driving and ride Metrorail instead.
“Sometimes with these projects, I don’t know that they utilize the system, the rapid transit system, as readily as they propose that people will use it, and so the justification or the anticipated offset impacts to traffic aren’t actually realized,” Ewing said.
The City of Miami has its doubts as well about the impact these bigger buildings will have on the quality of life for Miami residents.
The county gave cities like Miami two years to come up with a plan for implementing the new zoning rules, but Miami chose to push back instead with a lawsuit and a resolution that declares the expansion of the county’s RTZ zoning inside city limits as an “immediate danger to the health, safety or welfare of the public.”
The resolution, adopted in July 2024, authorizes the City Attorney to take “any and all action(s) necessary” to mitigate the threat.
By the time the resolution was adopted, the city had already met once with the county in an attempt to resolve the dispute. A second meeting was cancelled.
In the meantime, Regalado – the county commissioner whose district includes the West Grove – has promised to update community members about the development plans for all nine properties, but not until negotiations with Related and Integral Florida are both complete.
Reynold Martin, chairman of GRACE (Grove Rights and Community Equity), an organization that advocates for fair housing and economic development in the West Grove, has called that approach “troubling.”
“They do negotiations and then they come and have community engagement, which means that the community engagement may not have an impact, because it comes after negotiations,” he said.
Regalado said this week she plans to provide another community briefing once the negotiations with Integral Florida are complete and the final package for those properties comes back to the County Commission.
This is a perfect example of a building that is out of character and scale with the neighborhood. Does the County care about that?
Ms. Ewing and Ms. Cooper are concerned for good reason, as the building would be 15 stories taller than what the zoning code allows.
Once again, those magic words “affordable housing” are incanted before our elected officials and “like a hell-broth”, high-rise apartment buildings grow in and over a neighborhood that hasn’t been consulted. Here’s what’s wrong with this one:
1. It’s replacing a successful, well-maintained, non-intrusive apartment residence hall for senior citizens. The existing 3 to 5-story building backs up to single-family and duplex homes.
2. It’s directly opposite another new mid-rise apartment complex (with an Aldi grocery) on the corner of Douglas Road and Day Avenue where the traffic already often requires two or three light changes to cross US1.
3. It’s lottery-system won’t give preference to displaced neighborhood residents for selecting who gets to live there.
4. And most importantly, it will continue to accelerate the gentrification of one of Miami’s historic Black neighborhoods.
Commissioner Regalado may argue that high-rise apartment buildings like this one are the only way to solve “the housing crisis” but that is simply not true. It’s merely the easiest way to create more habitable units mostly for singles and couples without kids. In the long run, if you count social costs, it’s not even the cheapest way since rental high-rise apartments do not produce community involvement the way single-family homes, duplexes and small apartment buildings do. How could they? You can’t have pets and kids and back-yard neighbors like you do in real neighborhoods.
This project, with true and meaningful community input, might well be part of the solution to the “housing crisis,” but not the only part.