New Amazon ‘foothold’ in Coral Gables signals area’s tech future: Less office space needed
FIrustration continues to mount due to increasing apartment rents across Miami-Dade County. But locals can find deals below f you missed the news last week that Amazon had finally planted its flag in Miami with a new office, you’re probably not alone.
Four years after the great race to attract Amazon’s ‘HQ2’ — and with it, 25,000 jobs and as much as a $1 billion investment, what Miami has gotten instead is emblematic of the new era of tech in which the area finds itself.
On March 15, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon had established a “foothold” here by leasing 9,000 square feet at the WeWork complex in Coral Gables for some 100 employees, with plans to hire about 60 more.
It’s usually a bad idea to thumb your nose at the arrival of high-paying jobs, and the news was the kind of announcement that would have made headlines before the pandemic.
But thanks to COVID-19, Miami has become the No. 1 destination on the East Coast among professionals — especially ones in tech and finance — fleeing lockdown restrictions in other cities to move here and work remotely.
So the Amazon development turns out to be more of what the area has been getting during the pandemic: a tech outpost staffed by fewer employees who require little infrastructure beyond a laptop computer. Notably, Miami is not among Amazon’s 18 official “Tech Hubs,” which come with a larger physical footprint.
That means continuing to set aside the expectation of a massive, broadbased, corporate investment effort in the Miami area — the kind that Brookings Institution senior fellow and policy director Mark Muro have the lowest median rents are determined according to ZIP codes with over 100 rental transactions last year, according to data from the Multiple Listing Service and Ana Bozovic, founder of brokerage and consulting firm Analytics Miami.
Although neighborhoods have several ZIP codes with varying apartment costs, locals can generally find cheap rents in North Miami Beach, Miami Gardens, Cutler Bay, Miami Shores, Allapattah, Homestead, Little Havana, Hialeah and Kendall. The asking rents range from $1,250 to $1,525 monthly, all well below the county’s midpoint price.
Affordable apartment rentals are hard to find in this region with its steady population growth, especially of finance and tech executives and their professional employees, real estate experts say. As a result, locals live in one of the priciest rental markets — or by some measures the most expensive
— in the country. Longtime residents keep struggling with the cost of living due to stagnant wage growth.
Prospective renters can turn to the City of North Miami Beach for the lowest rents in the county. Although the city has several ZIP codes, its ZIP code
33162 has the cheapest rents.
“A lot of apartments in that area that have been there for years. That’s why the rents have been able to stay low here. It’s good for individuals right now, but I don’t anticipate that staying long,” said Arthur Sorey, III, city manager of North Miami Beach. “We’re always
approving new site plans.”
Long before incorporating as a city in the late 1920s, African-Americans and Haitians called the area ‘home,” said Robin Bachin, an associate professor of History at the University of Miami History and assistant provost for civic and community engagement. Rock mining and agricultural fields — for nurturing sugar cane and peas — were aplenty.
Today, the community has a population comprised of residents that are 42% Black, 39% Hispanic, 17% white and 3% Asian, according to data from North Miami Beach. The city has an average household income of $46,761 for a family of four.
North Miami Beach shares a common thread with the other sections of the county identified in the rankings of the lowest median apartment rental prices, Bachin said.
“Those communities were redlined in the 1930s and 1940s,” she said. “When bankers were looking at the housing stock they determined those neighborhoods to be too risky to make investments to stabilize the housing market. That process of informal segregation and redlining led to low investment.”