MIAMI’S BIG CHANGE
Few could have predicted the dramatic changes Miami has seen in the past century. Here's how it happened.
IT IS home to some of the Gold Coast’s most expensive beachfront property, but controversy has long surrounded development in Miami.
Lodged between booming Burleigh Heads and the ultraexclusive Hedges Ave, Miami is a suburb in flux, as property prices go up and the area awaits the light rail Stage 3.
The beachside suburb has been home to everything from the Gold Coast’s first theme park, Magic Mountain, to the Miami Ice building that became a major landmark after being featured in John Farnham’s 1988 music video for Two Strong Hearts.
But in the past two years Miami has become home to increasingly expensive real estate.
New data last week revealed sales records fell in 2021 as cashed-up and lockdownweary southerners migrated to the Gold Coast in droves.
Miami’s best was the $4.51m paid for a four-bedroom luxury beachfront villa. It was $1.3m above the reserve price.
The suburb came to existence almost a century ago on the back of a similar real estate boom.
In the early 1920s, the area was simply part of the Burleigh township.
The decade brought with it a generation of investors looking for cheap real estate to develop and their eyes turned to North Burleigh.
The area was primarily swamp and scrub, though the northern sections were already being sold by businessman William Hedges, for whom the city’s Millionaire’s Row is named.
A development known as Miami Shore at North Burleigh was built.
The most prominent building of the era was the two-level Hotel Miami, built in 1925 by proprietor EH Berry.
The Miami name stuck, though it was not listed as a separate suburb until the 1950s when the entire region was declared a city – South Coast.
The Mermaid Beach and Miami beachfront area was dramatically reshaped in the early 1940s during World War II.
US General Douglas MacArthur relocated to Australia following the fall of the Philippines to the Empire of Japan.
Making his base in Brisbane, a significant number of the US forces under Macarthur’s command were housed on the Gold Coast in a specially created camp.
During this era, the beachfront to Miami’s north was dubbed “Los Angeles Beach” by the Americans, who fell in love with the region.
Many of the fibro huts built for this camp would remain for decades and form much of the housing stock of the 1950s and 1960s.
Among them was the building that became Miami Ice on the Gold Coast Highway.
Fast-forward to the 1980s and the area was in the midst of a dramatic change.
Magic Mountain was an icon, drawing in tens of thousands of tourists annually, and the population was increasing dramatically.
Many of Miami’s older buildings were gradually being demolished, while cashed-up investors from Japan were snapping up blocks of land.
This drew the ire of a highly vocal group of Gold Coasters, led by businessman Bruce Whiteside who in mid-1988 protested against any development or Japanese investment.
They blamed federal and state government policies for a Japanese property spree that accounted for millions of dollars’ worth of Gold Coast real estate changing hands each week.
Community critics slammed policies that allowed a high-rise block at Miami to be sold off the plan entirely to Japanese buyers.
“The meeting, attended by 1300 people, opened a Pandora’s box of fear, anger and xenophobia which had simmered quietly for years,” News Corp reported at the time.
“Sources in the Australian embassy in Tokyo said the Gold Coast protests had received widespread unfavourable publicity in Japan.”
Tourism and property industry leaders pleaded for rational discussion, not “hysterical racism’’ which they feared would drive muchneeded dollars away from Australia.
A second meeting failed to secure the same level of interest, with perennial mayoral candidate Brian Shepherd slamming the revival of “yellow peril”.
He said: “sound, sensible-thinking Gold Coasters’’ did not consider Japanese investment an issue.
The issue failed to deter further development which only escalated in the 1990s and 2000s, as new towers rose on the skyline.
After a lull in the early 2010s as a result of the global financial crisis, Miami has again become one of the Gold Coast’s boom suburbs.