Miami-Dade County reveals new affordable housing master plan
The second phase of one of the largest mixed-income housing redevelopments in Miami-Dade County will officially break ground Tuesday morning.
Construction will begin on the 150-unit Gallery at River Parc, an apartment rental building at 780 NW 13th Court in Miami’s Little Havana. The building will be comprised of 30 affordable housing units and 120 workforce units.
“We’re taking the same approach we used with the
Liberty Square redevelopment, where we build on empty portions of the site and then move the residents into the new buildings once they are finished,” said Albert Milo, principal and senior vice president of Related Urban Development, the affordable housing division of The Related Group. “They’ll be living in a brand new unit, but their rent will remain the same.”
Details about the new building, as well as the rest of the ambitious River Parc Master Plan, will be announced at a press conference Tuesday by MiamiDade
County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, Miami-Dade County Commissioner Eileen Higgins, and U.S. HUD Regional Administrator Denise Cleveland-Leggett.
The master plan will lay out the specifics of the rest of the redevelopment of the 22-acre property known as Senior Campus near Marlins Park. That land formerly housed three public housing developments restricted to people aged 55 and over.
Those three buildings contained a total of 800 units. When completed, the $600 million River Parc redevelopment will add an additional 1,800 affordable and workforce units, for a total housing count of 2,600.
The first phase of the redevelopment, completed in October 2018, was the Martin Fine Villas, a 104unit affordable housing building for seniors at 1301 NW Seventh Street that replaced a former 50-unit complex of the same name.
The $37.5 million Gallery project marks the start of the second phase of the plan. Milo said the building was made economically feasible by government aid such as federal tax credits, the City of Miami’s bond program and donation of the land by Miami-Dade County. A private partnership with SunTrust Bank, which provided a $28 million construction loan and a sizable equity investment, helped to seal the deal.
“This is a relatively new solution to the housing affordability issue,” said Rebecca Cox, senior vice president and relationship manager at SunTrust. “You can serve various income levels across the community, not just extremely lowincome households.”