As the ultrawealthy flow into Coconut Grove, the village is attracting global attention — and confronting familiar tensions over affordability, character and who, and what, still belongs.
Halfway down Anchorage Way — a historic, tree-lined cul-de-sac linking Main Highway to the shallow waters of Biscayne Bay — the street simply stops as a security gate blocks the road.
On a recent bike ride on a weekday afternoon, a Spotlight reporter was halted before reaching the gate: a guard emerged from a nearby building and asked, politely but firmly, for the visitor to state his business.
Welcome to a new Coconut Grove.
The Anchorage Way property is home to Google cofounder Larry Page, the world’s second-richest person, worth an estimated $250 billion, who dropped $188 million over the last three months on this and two nearby homes — part of a broader influx of extreme wealth that is beginning to reshape the Grove in subtle, everyday ways.
“When people hear ‘billionaire,’ they think yachts and mansions,” said lifelong Grove resident Tony Scornavacca. “What you actually feel day to day is the ripple effect — who can afford to stay, what gets built, and how the neighborhood starts to behave differently.”
Of course, Page isn’t the only billionaire to pull up stakes for Coconut Grove in recent weeks — and he is unlikely to be the last. In 2024, Panera Bread founder Ron Shaich, whose net worth is estimated at $1.2 billion, purchased a 4,800-square-foot condo on South Bayshore Drive.
And two weeks ago, fellow Grove-based hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin — No. 21 on the Forbes list, with a net worth exceeding $50 billion — agreed to help fund an initiative aimed at attracting still more business leaders and ultra-wealthy individuals to South Florida.
For longtime residents and small business owners, the effects of the wealth surge are increasingly hard to ignore.
While the influx of wealth may bring new investment and benefit luxury property sellers, some Grove residents worry it is accelerating changes that have already displaced small businesses and renters.
A growing number of redevelopment projects have replaced long-standing neighborhood fixtures with higher-end uses, prompting concerns about the future of Coconut Grove’s historic character.
Scornavacca, a real estate broker by trade, told the Spotlight that the stream of uber-affluent folks moving to the area is bound to put further pressure on real estate pricing.
“The influx of wealthy people is definitely driving up property values and rent,” Scornavacca said. “People rediscovered the Grove after the pandemic. Developers saw the beauty of the bay, the trees, the charm, and said, ‘This will appeal to some very high-income bracket residents.’”
Whether you call it an evolution — or the “Death of the Old Grove” — Scornavacca believes the shifting of the community into a more urban, “Brickell-like” atmosphere is likely to continue.
Anthony Dunbar, owner of the Catch-A-Wave surf shop on SW 27th Avenue on the village outskirts, said while Coconut Grove has long had an upscale reputation, the pace of post-pandemic redevelopment has been unlike anything he had seen in his four decades of doing business here.
“You know, Coconut Grove has always been expensive, but it just took a huge jump. A few brand-new luxury buildings in my area doubled the condominium prices, and that bled off to commercial rates,” Dunbar said. “I was priced out of the [downtown] Grove. It’s for the billionaires now.”
The tale is becoming more and more familiar for Coconut Grove tenants and small business operators.
The Last Carrot, one of the Grove’s longest-running eateries, shut down on Feb. 7 after 51 years in business to make way for Ziggurat, a mixed-use development that plans to offer boutique offices, retail outlets, and 18 multimillion-dollar residential units along Grand Avenue in Center Grove. (The Last Carrot’s owner told the Spotlight she hopes to reopen at an alternate location – if she can find one she can afford.)
Dunbar said he previously paid between $5,000 and $8,000 a month for various commercial spaces including at CocoWalk mall in the heart of Coconut Grove. After his landlord wanted to raise the rent in 2023 to roughly $40,000, he relocated the shop to a less expensive area farther from the village center, near U.S. 1.
As venerable restaurants and shops disappear and redevelopment inches forward, Dunbar fears Coconut Grove’s wealth-focused facelift extends beyond economic change. In his view, the Grove is losing the offbeat character that for decades made it appealing to artists, free-thinkers, and the area’s youth seeking refuge from a more frenzied Miami.
“The Grove used to be a place where young people who were kind of lost in the world could hang out. You had incredible relationships between people,” he said. “The millionaires and billionaires who are moving in — many of them are nice, but it’s different — they’re obviously not as homey, not as open.”
The recent high-end real estate acquisitions in Coconut Grove are part of a steady wave of wealth migration to Miami-Dade, where the population of millionaires has nearly doubled over the past decade, according to a report by Henley & Partners.
As of 2024, Miami-Dade County had more than 38,000 millionaires, representing the highest density of high-net-worth individuals among U.S. metropolitan areas studied by Henley & Partners.
And yet the wealth is not trickling down.
Over the past two years, Miami-Dade has ranked as the least affordable housing market in the nation, relative to residents’ average income. Wages grew, but nowhere near enough to cover rising housing costs amid a real estate boom fueled, in part, by foreign investment and an influx of out-of-state buyers hoping to escape pandemic restrictions and capitalize on Florida’s lack of state income tax.
The new arrivals are not just buying homes; they are reshaping Miami’s economic trajectory.
Griffin, who snapped up $106 million worth of adjoining bayfront residential properties in North Grove in 2022, is also building a 54-story tower in Brickell at an anticipated cost of more than $2 billion as the headquarters for his Citadel hedge fund.
Alongside real estate mogul Stephen Ross, Griffin is reportedly investing millions in Ambition Accelerated, an initiative to attract executives and investors to the area.
“Miami and the broader South Florida Gold Coast offer deep talent, regulatory clarity and an extraordinary quality of life,” Griffin said in a statement about the initiative. “These are not secondary considerations; they are foundations for long-term success, and their impact compounds over time.”
Yet Coconut Grove’s relationship with extreme wealth is not new.
Coconut Grove has a history of attracting rich, industrious residents dating back well over a hundred years.
Railroad investor Arthur Curtiss James, industrialist William Matheson, farm equipment tycoon William Deering and his sons James and Charles set up winter retreats around the Grove in the early 1900s, enduring often harsh conditions for idyllic bay views and the lush, subtropical landscape.
“By the 1920s, ‘Millionaires’ Row’ along County Road — today’s Main Highway — was a hub of grand winter residences typically occupied from December through spring,” said Miami historian Iris Guzman Kolaya, who adds that the Grove’s wealth influxes follow a pattern of peaks and lulls.
Kolaya noted that the wealthy business leaders who moved in during the “Golden Era” of Grove estates in the early 1900s typically weren’t seeking a pampered lifestyle that one might have found in the resort towns of Palm Beach or Miami Beach, which were likewise burgeoning hubs for the wealthy.
“What’s fascinating when you look at the 1910s and 1920s: These wealthy individuals could have picked any place to live, and they chose Coconut Grove,” Kolaya said.
Some of the Grove’s most iconic structures were built in that era, including Vizcaya, James Deering’s crown-jewel estate built with Tuscan Renaissance and Mediterranean Revival design. A reported 10 percent of the fledgling local population worked on the project in one capacity or another.
Around 1923, Deering is said to have opened the estate up for public visits on Sundays — a stark contrast to the high-security, cordoned-off billionaire bunkers that have generated community backlash in cities like Palo Alto, California.
After being acquired by Miami-Dade County for $1 million in 1952, Vizcaya now serves as a museum and gardens — one of Coconut Grove’s most popular attractions.
Other historic Grove homes have not been so lucky, warned Kolaya, the current president of Dade Heritage Trust, as today’s ultrawealthy — and even the sort-of-wealthy — favor massive single-family homes to the modest structures of an earlier era.
(Sometimes even the landscape gets in the way: Two doors down from Griffin, Terra Group CEO David Martin and his wife were cited last year for removing part of a protected geological feature while building their 21,000-square-foot waterfront home.)
“A community can evolve and address its current needs without demolishing everything and starting over, which is what we tend to do in South Florida,” Kolaya said.
For his part, Griffin has run into controversy over the fate of Villa Serena, a 1913 home built for renowned orator and politician William Jennings Bryan that sits on his Biscayne Bay property.
In November 2025, Vizcaya Museum announced that Griffin offered to move the historic home to its nearby grounds and pledged $5 million for its upkeep — a case of the Grove’s ultrawealthy of today offloading their unwanted to the former estate of the Grove’s ultrawealthy of an earlier era. (Griffin has made a separate $20 million donation to revitalize Vizcaya Village and build a new Center for Learning and Discovery).
Although the Miami real estate market has cooled down from its peak, mega-mansions valued at tens of millions of dollars continue to sell at a consistent pace in Coconut Grove.
In December, construction magnate Jorge Mas (worth $4.1 billion according to Forbes) a co-owner of the Inter Miami CF professional soccer franchise, sold his 7-acre waterfront parcel in South Grove for roughly $100 million in an off-market deal. The buyer remains a mystery.
Scornavacca, who oversees a popular Facebook page where people post photos and memories of a past era of Coconut Grove, said it’s painful to see the buildings of his youth razed to the ground, but refuses to view it as a tragedy, as many Grovites do.
“It’s all about perspective,” he said. “The new owners, residents, and shop owners are ecstatic to be here. But yeah, I miss my little hometown.”
So what happened with the reporter? Was he allowed through? Isn’t that a public road? Or is Anchorage way a private road?
An influx of investment isn’t always a good thing. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and moved to the Grove in 1994, when it was actually going through a downturn, and right before San Francisco was about to explode. I had been able to rent a room in a flat two blocks from Haight/Ashbury for $300/mos when I was at school at San Francisco State. There’s no way a college student could afford that area any more. Also, San Francisco always had a homeless problem, but after the money started pouring in, it went crazy. Same with Portland, Seattle and LA. The homeless crisis didn’t arrive until after the insane amounts of money did.
And now I’m seeing it here. It’s such a shame. I wish they would employ a (real) community liaison company or something, and not just use their money and influence to get ‘regulatory clarity’, ie – be able to do whatever they want regardless of the impact on the rest of us.
Money is a tool. You can use it in all sorts of ways. Imagine having unlimited resources and rather than do all sorts of things to make everyone’s lives better, you make your own life WAY better than anyone else’s and shut the gate. That seems very lonely to me.