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THE WEEKENDER: 11.06.26
Miami is still being built, and this week the question is who gets to build it.
A 300 foot Live Local tower just landed in Sunset Harbour, the second in a matter of weeks, on the site of Office Depot. Foster + Partners on the drawings, a longevity spa in the amenities, and $2,800 studios for workforce housing. Sunset Harbour might get the density it needs to support the businesses.
Then I sat down with Alison Greenfield, the developer who turned the old Miami Heart Institute into the Ritz Carlton Residences and is now building Mirai with Kengo Kuma in the Design District. We got into foreclosure auctions, the five ring circus of development, why AI can’t teach you to think, and her answer to Live Local.
SUNSET HARBOUR GETS A 2nd LIVE LOCAL TOWER
Sunset Harbour just got its second Live Local tower proposal in a matter of weeks. This one would rise 300 feet on the site of Office Depot.
EOS Wellness Real Estate Miami filed plans for a 44 unit building at 1771 West Avenue, designed by ODP and Foster + Partners. It tops out at 325 feet at its highest point. The land sold last year for $28.5 million.
How do you get 300 feet in a city that capped this area at 150? Live Local lets a project build to the tallest height allowed within a mile. Miami Beach lowered that cap in April 2024, but state law freezes the number at whatever was allowed in July 2023. Back then, it was 300.
The breakdown: 18 workforce units at up to 120% of area median income, with studios topping out around $2,800 a month. 26 market rate condos, up to four bedrooms. The site could hold 86 units. They filed for barely half.
The theme is wellness. Multiple pools, a longevity spa, recovery rooms, physical therapy and aesthetics. Street level gets 6,391 square feet of retail, with 117 parking spaces in the podium. And unlike other recent Live Local fights on the Beach, there’s no historic building in the way.
I’m pro density. Sunset Harbour businesses live and die by who’s around in August, and more full time neighbors is good for every shop on the block. But let’s call this what it is. A $2,800 studio is market rent. A 44 unit wellness tower by Foster + Partners is a luxury condo using a housing law to get its height. That’s not a scandal. It’s the law working exactly as written.
What’s Good Podcast Episode #31: Allison Greenfield, the developer behind the Ritz Carlton Residences Miami Beach on adaptive reuse, Live Local, and Mirai, her new project with Kengo Kuma.
Most developers talk about square footage. Alison Greenfield talks about soul.
She walked into the Moore to meet me in a big hat with a bigger smile, and within ten minutes we were arguing about AI, Darwin and whether this generation has any grit. Then we got to real estate, and she was the most precise person in the room.
Thirty years in. Born in Pittsburgh, Barnard for college, then Parsons for a master’s in architecture in her late 20s, because contractors kept nodding at her and building something else.
The Courtroom Steps
Her first deal was a studio on Columbus Avenue and 82nd Street, bought at a foreclosure auction. Five percent in cash that day, the rest in 30 days. She didn’t have the rest. She flipped it in 30 days.
That’s still how she runs her company. “There is no plan B. Plan B is execute plan A.”
She was in college in her early 20s, needed a better apartment and had no intention of moving back to Pittsburgh, so she signed up for the real estate licensing class at the Hotel Pennsylvania, across from Madison Square Garden. That’s where she met Ophir Sternberg. He looked at the coffee in front of her and asked if she was drinking it. She told him to go ahead. He drank it, and that was the start of a partnership that lasted almost 30 years. They began in New York, working residential deals, and she figured out fast that she couldn’t sell something she didn’t believe in. So they started buying their own, beginning with that studio on the courtroom steps. Over three decades the business stretched from New York and New Jersey to Florida, and it all traces back to one cup of coffee she gave away. As a coffee guy, I respect the origin story.
Her PhD in Getting Shit Done
She came to Miami around 2007, waited while nothing penciled, then bought while everyone else was licking their wounds. That run led to the building I drive past every day: the Ritz Carlton Residences Miami Beach, the old Miami Heart Institute.
She calls it the largest adaptive reuse project South Florida has seen. Pilings from the 1930s King Cole Hotel sat under pilings from every decade after, none of them talking to each other. Sixty layouts across 111 units. A full year negotiating with neighbors before she ever went to the city, a 21 page set of covenants, and approval on first reading. Seven years from start to sellout. She calls it her PhD.
It’s the least efficient building imaginable. That’s exactly why people love it.
The Five Ring Circus
Her model of development is five rings running at once: the deal, the financing, entitlements and architecture, construction, and marketing. The developer is the ringmaster. If one ring fails, the project fails.
The great developers, she says, are the Rosetta Stone between the numbers and the design. Investors need their money back. Architects need someone to tell them who the building is for. The job is translating in both directions. When it works, you get what the Italians call beauty.
Mirai with Kengo Kuma
Her Design District project with Kengo Kuma is built around a scale drop. The neighborhood’s flagships run 5,000 square feet and up. Hers are 1,000 square foot modules you can combine, built for brands that want a Design District address without paying $6 million a year in rent. She met Kuma at a dinner party and told him exactly that. Opening winter 2028.
The bigger play is Second Avenue. She sees it as the Design District’s Madison Ave to its Fifth Avenue: one way, tree lined, walkable. Sant Ambroeus is taking the first corner, she wouldn’t say who’s taking the next corner, only that it’s impressive. I believe her.
Live Local
I wrote about Live Local this week. She’s pro density, like me. But 120 AMI is basically market rent today, so the affordability shows up years later as buildings age. Her answer to losing character is design: keep the facade, build the tower inside it, light it beautifully. Domino Sugar in Williamsburg is the model.
On AI
She calls herself a humanist. AI can get you the grade, but it can’t teach you to think. You think, then you write, then you speak. Those three make you successful. Entry level jobs will shrink, and the winners will be the people who can pitch, build relationships and bring taste.
I told her taste is not for sale. She said, “There you go.”
THE TEN QUESTIONS
What’s your name and what do you do? Alison Greenfield. Real estate developer.
How long have you lived in Miami? Twenty years.
Where do you live? The Upper East Side. “We got the bay, we got the parks, we got it all.”
How do you take your coffee? She doesn’t. English Breakfast or a London Fog, a little milk, a little sugar. I’m working on her.
Hidden gem? Kayaking Little River out to the picnic islands in Biscayne Bay. Manatees if you’re lucky.
What do you love most about Miami? “It’s now. We are in it, and I don’t think we’re going to be out of it in my lifetime.”
How do you share your creativity? “I build buildings and raise children.”
How do you define success? “The best projects are the ones where everybody wins.”
What do you believe? “I believe in humans.”
Favorite quote? “If” by Rudyard Kipling. She didn’t have her glasses, so I read the whole thing on camera.
MR. MIAMI TAKE
New York, LA and London are concrete. You can add a little piece and call it a career. Miami is clay. It keeps forming, and one person can still reshape a neighborhood. Craig Robins did it here. Alison did it on the old Heart Institute site, and she’s about to do it again on Second Avenue.
She said it better than I could: Miami is to the 21st century what New York was to the 20th.
Keep your SPF high and your standards higher.
That’s what’s good, Miami.
Keep your SPF high and your standards higher.
See you at the beach.
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