‘Don’t know what to do’: Edgewater residents face losing their homes in overheated housing market
Georgina Gonzalez finally found a community in Edgewater to call home four years ago. Until then, she moved around the gentrifying and desirable Miami neighborhood every two years due to developers either raising rents or buying sites for development of more expensive housing.
Gonzalez found her haven in a twostory, 26-unit garden apartment building at 455 NE 33rd St., where she pays about $1,000 monthly in a month-tomonth lease for a one bedroom. The Mexican native’s neighbors are retirees, car wash employees, carpenters, accountants and housekeepers like her from across the Caribbean and Central America.
Despite the roaches, peeling paint and her broken kitchen light, Gonzalez has called the building home since 2018.
Her neighbors treat the single mother of a special needs child like their own mamá. They invite her to birthday parties with piñatas and barbecues celebrated around the building’s former pool, replaced by a mammoth-sized planter lined with palm trees.
But her life — and the lives of everyone else living in her building — soon will be uprooted again. Her new landlords are forcing her and the other tenants out by late July, according to a notice posted on her door three weeks ago by the building’s management company Frost Property Management LLC.
“I’m tired of moving,” Gonzalez said. “I want something more stable. I don’t even know where to start. At this point believe me I just don’t know what to do.”
In March, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Beitel Group and Aimco of Denver bought the 2.8-acre site, which includes Gonzalez’s building in two transactions totaling $46.8 million. The firms are teaming on a new housing, office and retail project for the property that spans from Biscayne Boulevard to Gonzalez’s building, across from Bay Park Towers.
Based on zoning, Aimco and Beitel can build up to 60 stories high, with a maximum of 450 residential units. Based on the time it takes to pull permits and finish designs and planning, construction wouldn’t start for at least a year. However, that didn’t stop the displacement notices now. The developers declined to answer questions about the development timetable.
The Miami Herald spoke with nine renters at the garden apartment building whose lives are being upended as they struggle to find new places to live they can afford in Miami-Dade County’s hot housing market.
Their stories resemble that of other residents in the neighborhood. Two years ago, Aimco acquired Hamilton on the Bay for $81 million, steps from Gonzalez’s building. About 200 renters were forced to leave the following year.
Behind Gonzalez’s building, a 97year-old small apartment building and its tenants faced the same fate in 2021 from another developer. And nearby her building, two different developers continue to battle for control over the 250-unit condominium Bay Park Towers.
Edgewater continues to grow in popularity during the county’s wealth migration. The bayfront community sits on the mainland between the Venetian Causeway and the Julia Tuttle Causeway, bordering the Arts & Entertainment District, Wynwood, Midtown Miami and the Design District. After the Melo Group entered the neighborhood in 2001, other developers have been flooding in to replace boutique apartment buildings with residential towers that charge higher rents.
In fact, the neighborhood’s increasing appeal has made it one of the priciest places in the county to rent an apartment. As workers like Gonzalez are forced out, Edgewater business owners struggle to fill essential positions.
“I’m not going to come from Homestead, because I use public transportation,” Gonzalez said, referring to her employer in Miami Beach. Businesses and wealthy residents, she said, “need us, and we need them. We should be united.”
She and her neighbors want more time to find a new residence, said Elsa Menjivar, a resident of the building since 2008. Born in El Salvador, Menjivar lives with her husband and two sons. She wants to remain in Edgewater, close to her sons’ school. She said a six-month extension would give her sufficient time to search and save for the move.
Tony Recio, a lawyer with Weiss Serota Helfman Cole + Bierman and a representative for Aimco, said tenants can ask the building’s management company Frost for possible lease extensions. But, Recio said, “under the new county ordinance, there’s a 60-day notice required for this kind of action. We’ve given them more time — three and a half months — to make alternative arrangements.”