The developers who sought to divide the property prevailed last week in a contested vote, over the objections of Miami’s professional planning staff and a large contingent of angry neighbors.
Is lot-splitting the favorite tactic of developers who want to maximize their space to build in Coconut Grove?
It may seem so after Miami’s Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board (PZAB) agreed last week to split a 21,000-square-foot property into three building sites, against the advice of the city’s professional planners and over the strong objections of disgruntled neighbors.
The South Grove property at 4055 Poinciana Ave. is composed of three platted lots but had historically been united as one building site with one single-family home since 1947 when Harry Truman lived in the White House.
The property sold for $1.9 million in 2021, according to county property records, and then again in 2023, when 4055 Poinciana Ave LLC, a Miami Beach company managed by Ramiro Cuellar and Marvin Colegial, paid $2.7 million for the land.
The developers then sought a warrant to split the property into three 7,000-square-foot building sites facing Poinciana Avenue so they could build one house on each lot.
The concept was rejected by neighbors who worried the split would hurt the tree canopy, add more cars to the street, and squish even more density into a part of the Grove that’s already bracing for the addition of several large apartment complexes.
“We’re in trouble in Coconut Grove and across Miami with the Live Local Act cramming more and more people in increased density along the Metrorail. That’s a problem. We don’t need to do that within our neighborhoods,” said John Dolson, a South Grove neighbor who vehemently opposed the request at a PZAB hearing on June 4.
Miami’s Planning Department opposed the split as well.
While the severed lots would meet the minimum single-family lot size required by the Miami 21 zoning code, city planners found the requested split did not meet the intent and guiding principles of the zoning code in other key ways. Planners evaluated the request using seven criteria. The request failed to meet five criteria.
But PZAB looked the other way in a 6-3 vote that approved the split with conditions offered up by the developer that 40% of the property would be reserved for landscaped open space and at least six trees would be planted alongside each home, double the requirement mandated by Miami 21.
Opponents of the decision are now considering filing an appeal.
“They know what they bought. This is just another case of a developer wanting more than the law allows,” Morningside resident Elvis Cruz told the board before the vote.
Tucker Gibbs, a Coconut Grove attorney representing one of the opposing neighbors, says the question of splitting the property should turn on Coconut Grove’s status as a neighborhood conservation district (NCD-3) – a designation intended to shield the neighborhood from unwanted development.
“The whole point of the NCD-3 is to give the community more control over the zoning that impacts them,” Gibbs told the Spotlight. “They (the PZAB) misunderstand what an NCD warrant is about.”
The NCD-3, which was created to help preserve the unique architecture, canopy and history of the Grove, states that Coconut Grove’s character is partially derived from its unique property sizes and shapes. It’s one of the requirements that Gibbs and the city’s planning staff said the warrant did not meet.
In a report to the board, planning staff found the smaller proposed lots would be out of place on the 4000 block of Poinciana Avenue, where the average lot size is 11,712 square feet. In the surrounding neighborhood, within a quarter mile of the property in question, the average lot size is 9,300 square feet, the report says.
The developers’ representatives interpreted this the opposite way, suggesting large lots with the potential for mega-mansions was one of the problems facing the Grove.
“What Coconut Grove isn’t – in my opinion and I suggest is the common conception – it is not grandiose. It is not monumental,” said Francisco Garcia, a former City of Miami planning director who represented the developers in their request.
The developers also pitched the split as an opportunity to enhance the canopy, as opposed to reducing it, since the city’s code requires three trees on each building site. Splitting the property would therefore require nine trees in total, instead of three.
To sweeten the deal, developers promised to double this requirement, guaranteeing six trees would be planted on each property so long as the split went through.
The city’s planning staff suggested a compromise of splitting the parcel into two 10,500-square-foot properties, but the developers’ representatives said re-platting the land with the county as two lots could take years to accomplish.
For the board, the decision came down to which version of the property was more in line with the Grove. Was it more appropriate to keep the property intact with the potential for a large mansion, or to disrupt the street by adding three homes on a tight perimeter?
Board member Paula De Carolis and five others agreed with the latter.
“I think an argument can be made that increasing the lot size does not preserve the historic character of the neighborhood. Especially if it enables the construction of disproportionately large homes, such as those with nine bedrooms, that reflect contemporary disproportionate housing trends,” De Carolis said.
The decision, with the conditions of additional open space and trees, will become final unless appealed within 15 days.
When I was first appointed to the Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board (PZAB) by Ken Russell a half dozen or more years ago, Charles Garavaglia had already been the Chair for many years. He was consistently fair and unbiased, keeping his own comments to a minimum and always voting last, often unexpectedly just to show that he thought both sides of an issue had valid arguments. Since then, the Board has become more and more pro-development, reflecting the pro-development leanings of the Commission and the Mayor who appoints them. It is why I resigned from PZAB, not wanting to be part of such an unbalanced Board and hoping I could be more vocal and effective on the outside—like now.
The articles in today’s Spotlight should not be surprising to anyone paying attention to what is happening in our City. Big Developer interests comprise the bulk of election (and re-election) campaign funding. Couple that with lower and lower voter turn-out in local elections and you get quantity (of development) over quality (of neighborhood life).
This lot-splitting issue in the Grove resurfaces now for the umpteenth time. Yes, there is an argument that large lots platted a half-century ago should be allowed to be split to build “smaller” houses – that will still be at least 4BR/3BA – despite the protests of the neighbors most directly affected. And yes, saplings planted to replace century-old tree canopy will eventually grow if watered and maintained. This is why the State requires the City to have a PZAB, comprised of non-elected citizens, who are supposed to consider all the contending sides of zoning and environmental issues without “a thumb on the scale.”
In my opinion, having served as both Chair of the Historical and Environmental Preservation Board (HEPB) and as Vice Chair of PZAB, that scale was drastically unbalanced by a 2019 Third District Court Decision, Cube 3585. In that case, the neighbors (and the City back then in supporting the PZAB) were protesting the demolition of a non-designated but historic house and argued a demolition waiver had to observe and follow NCD 3 Appendix A of the Zoning Code to “preserve the historic, heavily landscaped character of Coconut Grove’s residential areas” and “protect the architectural variety within the unique single-family neighborhood that comprises Coconut Grove.”
The Court instead held waivers were determined solely by a “practical difficulties standard” under Article 7.1.2.5 (waiver procedures) of the Zoning Code and not by the Intent of the NCD.
In sum, the Court said the NCD’s stated Intent to preserve existing neighborhoods didn’t count. The development industry has used that as a lethal weapon against existing neighborhoods ever since.