While most large master-planned communities are being built in growing markets on the outskirts of current development, Biscayne Landing is bringing a New Urbanism master-planned community with 6,000 residences to the epicenter of the South Florida megalopolis at the site of a former landfill overlooking the bay, a state park and nature preserve. The troubled site laid dormant for two decades after it ceased being used as a landfill in 1981, and it took a unique public/private partnership with the City of North Miami and Boca Developers to make Biscayne Landing a reality.

Like many properties in Florida, the Biscayne Landing site has a long and interesting history. It is at the eastern end of the growing city of North Miami, stretching nearly a mile along bustling Biscayne Boulevard and east through a 193-acre green oasis toward Biscayne Bay. Within a few minutes’ drive are the prestigious cities of Aventura, Bal Harbour and the ocean beaches.

Biscayne Landing was first slated for an EPCOT-like theme park and later a golf course, but the theme park never materialized and the golf course developer ended up using the site as a landfill for local municipal waste. Frustrated after a few unsuccessful proposals for the 200-acre site over the years, the city re-started the process by issuing a formal request for proposal (RFP). Surprisingly, the North Miami property, located in the heart of a 2000-acre enclave on Biscayne Bay only attracted a couple proposals. This, despite the fact that it includes Oleta River State Park - Florida’s largest urban park and home to everything from beaches and campsites to ballfields and kayak waterways - as well as a campus of Florida International University. Other immediate neighbors are a 230-acre nature preserve, a new kindergarten eighth-grade county school, a future high school, a Florida Fish & Wildlife Station, and the city’s athletic stadium.


A Unique Deal
“Joe Celestine (the former mayor of North Miami), John Dellagloria (the former North Miami city attorney), and developer Michael Swerdlow were the creators of the plan that eventually came together as a very unique public-private partnership,” explains Frank Schnidman, Executive Director of the new North Miami (FL) Community Redevelopment Agency. “The partnership was established in a manner that was transparent to the community and earned the trust of the citizens and every stakeholder. The result is a winning development plan for all parties.”

Schnidman stressed that the dynamics of the stakeholders also illustrates the diversity and collaborative nature of the community. Dellagloria, a white Jewish city attorney, crafted the documents and the development plan. (He is currently a Business Law professor in Miami.) Celestine was a very popular black mayor of Haitian background who was only forced out of office by the term-limit statute in the community.

The winning proposal submitted by the Boca Developers/Swerdlow Group, a joint venture between Boca Developers of Deerfield Beach (FL) and Swerdlow Group of Coconut Grove (FL), however, exceeded the initial expectations.

“Through the negotiation of a development agreement,” Schnidman relates, “they created a true public-private partnership which allowed the government to achieve its goals and allowed the private sector to achieve its goals. The public sector goal was to use the site as the economic engine to generate the tax revenue that could be used for the elimination of the slum and blight conditions in the deteriorated sections of the city. The private sector goal, of course, is profit.

“The development agreement was a very transparent public process of negotiating a deal whereby each side laid its wants and desires on the table and crafted a document in full view of the public,” says Schnidman.

Evidence that the process worked is the fact a city-wide referendum was required because of a four-story height limit and the buildings at Biscayne Landing were going to go 20 stories above that! The measure passed overwhelmingly. It not only approved the height of the buildings, but increased the density to allow for 6,000 units.

What really makes the development plan unique, and also very beneficial to the community, is that Boca Developers agreed to help the city build or renovate an equal number – a one-to-one ratio – of affordable residences located within the city as the number of market-rate homes that it builds in Biscayne Landing. This means that Boca agreed to construct up to 6,000 affordable residences within North Miami.

“This was made economically viable because all of the tax-increment financing (TIF) revenue from Biscayne Landing was not going to be provided as incentives to the developer,” Schnidman explains. “The land lease was crafted in such a way that the development was made private-sector financable without the use of the TIF. So, all of the new taxes were earmarked in support of the affordable units that would help the blighted areas of the city.”

Under the development agreement, the developer bids out the work for the construction of the affordable units, constructs them with the support of the CRA, and the builder builds it for cost and is guaranteed a 15% fee – a fee that is deemed fair based upon the limited risk undertaken by the builder/developer. It is a very economic rewarding arrangement for the developer and the city is able to alleviate the blight within the community by using the TIF funding in this manner.

In addition, Boca Developers committed $10 million towards the city’s new Olympic training facility, $10 million for its new library and assumed the responsibility to remediate the site to prevent it from potentially threatening the ecology of the adjacent nature preserve.

Jeff Scott, divisional president of Biscayne Landing, is responsible for overseeing the development and construction of the master-planned community that includes 6,000 condominium homes of Biscayne Landing. They will be a mixture of ocean view luxury towers, mid-rise villas by the park, and lakeside townhomes, complemented by lakes, groves, trails, swimming pools, clubhouses and a picturesque town center.

Financing the Deal
While the condominium market is feeling some downward pressures in many areas of the country, Scott explains that this project provides them with different factors that help alleviate some of the risks.

“The lease and development agreement was negotiated with no initial buy-in – so we didn’t have any basis in the land,” reveals Scott. “Ultimately that means no carrying costs associated with the land itself. Our carrying costs are associated with the infrastructure.”

The way that the lease works is that the ground rent starts when the building begins construction. While the units are being constructed, the developer will pay $750 per unit per year to the city as rent. But once a unit is built, the annual payments by the owner of the condominium to the city is $I,500 per unit per year.

"The other advantage that we have," explains Scott, "is that we have a 193-acre parcel of land that allows us to develop product in different areas of the project in response to the market. For instance, our project features a town center which includes about 280,000 square feet of office space, 175,000 square feet of retail, and a 250-room hotel. We can focus on the hospitality and commercial aspects of development during any period of time where the residential market is challenged.”

Another major player – but somewhat behind the scenes – was Miami-Dade County. The County awarded the City of North Miami $30 million over time to rehabilitate the site. Remember, it was a former landfill. The city, in turn, worked the the developer to use the funds to cap the landfill and mitigate the one environmental factor – the release of ammonia into the groundwater.

As indicated earlier, the TIF benefits did not go to the developer. The theory behind this structure was that if the deal was structured correctly, the project’s development would not need to be subsidized and the TIF revenue could flow to the affordable housing component which would be a larger benefit to North Miami. Therefore, traditional funding was the primary mechanism for the developer.

“We’ve funded a substantial amount of the project with our own money,” relates Scott. “but we also have a land and development loan on the project. The purpose of that loan is to fund the project’s infrastructure and overhead costs. Then, as each building is permitted, we bifurcate off a parcel of the lease and enter into a separate agreement with the city for that specific development and then we go out and get traditional construction financing.”

Boca Developers and its principals also made a personal commitment to make Biscayne Landing one of the most successful and talked-about master-planned communities in the entire country. The company retained Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn (EE&K) Architects, an internationally renowned firm that has a proven expertise in large-scale mixed-use developments and master-planned communities, as the master planner for the project. EE&K’s master plan, which was approved by the city in September, calls for a vibrant Town Center with more than 400,000 square feet of commercial space, including a major hotel plus a variety of offices and street-level retail. The plans include 74 acres of parks and trails, many of which lead into the adjoining Oleta River State Park and its campgrounds, ball fields, kayak waterways and beach. The property is envisioned as perhaps the only community in the country where residents will be able to enjoy the conveniences of urban living coupled with a very close connection to nature and an area’s unique natural beauty.

Providing the consumers for the community, the “A project like this requires intense cooperation from all of the involved entities,” states Doug Smith, an architect with EE&K, “like the municipalities, the developer, design team, the marketing people, and many others, but the glue that holds it all together is a strong vision. If you don’t have a strong vision, people lose commitment because they can’t see what the end result is going to be. I think Boca Developers took a really bold step and integrated a true mixed-use project that incorporates almost every type of use imaginable, yet in a very coordinated and attractive plan.” LDT