Developer supersizes to $250M apartment project by Metrorail near Coral Gables
Seizing on an expanded MiamiDade County effort to promote dense housing construction around Metrorail stations, developer Shoma Group wants to double the height and scale of an already massive project it’s been planning on a wedge of land squeezed between Bird Road, the Metrorail tracks and two major intersections along U.S. 1 in Miami.
The revised Shoma One project would cost $250 million and shoehorn a pair of 40-story towers with at least 740 apartments, a 700-car garage and a two-story food hall on a slender lot just steps from the intersections of Bird, U.S. 1 and Douglas Road and the highway. The site, at 3650 Bird Rd., is occupied by Deel Volkswagen’s used-car, parts and automobile-maintenance shops, which will be moving across the street.
Shoma bought the Deel property for $34 million in 2022 and had previously announced it would build a pair of 18-story apartment towers on the site, which sits along the path of the planned Underline urban park and trail and a block from the Douglas Road Metrorail Station.
That changed after the Miami-Dade commission last month approved an expansion of special zoning districts that supersede local municipal controls on height and density around transit stations to encourage developers to build badly needed housing. As a result, the old Deel property, which sits in the city of Miami, now falls under the county’s Douglas Road station “rapid-transit zone” and its far more generous development rules.
Shoma’s proposal comes as the state and MiamiDade have been pushing to relieve a shortage of housing, especially affor