Now with more affordable housing, massive makeover plan for Little River nears approval

Miami Herald

28-03-2025

It was already one of the biggest redevelopment proposals in Miami-Dade history, a $3 billion plan aiming to remake a broad swath of Miami's Little River-Little Haiti neighborhood with an intensive focus on affordable housing, transit and jobs. Now, as it heads toward likely approval from the County Commission, it's only gotten larger in scope and ambition.
Since its unveiling a year ago, the plan spearheaded by Coconut Grove-based developer Swerdlow Group has added hundreds of affordable apartments, more big-box shopping and commercial space, and a fresh element — over 2,000 workforce condos aimed at providing homeownership to middle-income families who are finding it increasingly difficult to buy in the city, especially in the urban core. That brings the total number of units in the plan to over 5,700, all qualifying as affordable or workforce housing under county guidelines.
In addition, veteran developer Michael Swerdlow and his partners in SG Holdings have committed to a list of benefits for construction workers that include higher-than-usual wages, jobs for residents from local public and low-income housing, and what the developer describes as an 'industry-leading' program to protect them against extreme heat, a principal cause of illness and death as the climate warms. The guarantees were in part a response to demands from WeCount!, a coalition of community groups and labor unions.
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After winning 5-0 endorsements from the County Commission's Housing and Appropriations committees, the massive plan is scheduled for full commission consideration on Tuesday. Swerdlow said he's confident it will win approval, given that nine of the board's 13 members have already voted in support in the committee hearings.
With county approval in hand, Swerdlow will turn next to securing zoning changes from the city of Miami that he said are already favorably under discussion, and approval from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Groundbreaking should come next year, he said.
The project, to be built over eight years, will provide not just housing and jobs with good pay to a neighborhood badly in need of both but should also help propel a turnaround for a broader area of central Miami that hasn't seen meaningful investment in decades, Swerdlow said in an interview.
'The number of new units is significant,' Swerdlow said. 'It should spur enormous growth around it. Everyone for 20 blocks in every direction is going to gain a lot from this. It's going to be very good for everybody.'
The development group, working in coordination with a big Little River property owner, AJ Capital Partners, was the sole respondent last year to a bid request from Miami-Dade's Housing department to redevelop several of its properties in the neighborhood, comprising four aging public housing projects and a county storage depot. The county sought proposals under a federally sponsored program that encourages the conversion of traditional, often outdated public housing projects into modern, mixed-income communities.
But Swerdlow's bid proposal went significantly beyond that to encompass a nearly mile-long stretch of the overlapping Little River and Little Haiti neighborhoods, an eye-popping 65 acres of private and public land, and some 5,000 new high-rise apartments affordable to people with incomes ranging from very low to middle-income.
The plan's scope was expanded and refined during months of negotiations with the county and input from residents and workers' rights groups, Swerdlow said.
Under the current proposal, some 2,284 rental apartments will be affordable to people with very low and low incomes, with 1,398 workforce units aimed at people making up to 120% of the county median income, which is now at $79,400. The developers also decided to pursue workforce condos, although that element will require specific authorization from the federal government, Swerdlow said.
Swerdlow said the plan has been conceived in stages so that existing public-housing tenants will not be even temporarily displaced from their homes — an issue that has been a pitfall for another big county housing redevelopment effort.
Under the HUD Rental Assistance Demonstration program, all current residents of Victory Homes, New Haven Gardens and two smaller sites, with a total of 314 households with low incomes, must be guaranteed new units in the Swerdlow development at the same subsidized rents they're paying now.
New towers to house them will be built first on adjacent sites, Swerdlow said. That means the residents will have to pack their belongings only once, then cross the street to their new apartments on moving day, he said. Only then will the old housing developments be demolished.
But at a WeCount! news conference on March 5, Victory Homes resident Erica Varela complained that neither Swerdlow nor the county had consulted with residents and questioned whether their guarantees of replacement housing without displacement can be trusted.
'This will mean an enormous change in this place where we live,' Varela said in Spanish. 'That right is not always respected. We need to make sure that this right is met in full, because there is a history of broken promises in this community.'
In other Rental Assistance Demonstration projects in Miami-Dade — including one of the largest, the conversion of the Liberty Square housing development in Liberty City by the Related Group's affordable-housing arm — many tenants ended up leaving permanently after enduring more than one relocation by the developers while waiting years for their replacement apartments to be finished. The Liberty Square issue was the subject of a documentary, 'Razing Liberty Square.'
Swerdlow said his group and county officials held one informational meeting with over 150 local residents in attendance on March 6, the day after the WeCount! conference, and will host several more before plans are finalized.
The Little River project will be financed by a combination of private investment, which Swerdlow said has already been secured, and the sale of federal tax credits designed to support affordable housing development.
AJ Capital, which bought a majority stake in a 27-acre collection of mostly industrial properties in the neighborhood in 2021 from Miami owners who had converted several into hip cafes, restaurants and workplaces, will build its own as-yet-unspecified development separately but in coordination with Swerdlow, though at a higher income scale.
The two developers will also partner in creation of a special development district that would direct property-tax revenue from the new construction into needed infrastructure improvements, like sewage lines, streets and sidewalks, that the project will require. The taxing district plan also would include financing of a planned new station for the recently inaugurated Tri-Rail commuter train service to downtown Miami, which runs on Florida East Coast Railway tracks through the spine of the redevelopment area.
The Swerdlow plan also includes big-box stores, a new Main Street-style shopping street, and acres of parks and green spaces.
The properties, though not all contiguous, extend in a band two to five city blocks wide that runs roughly from just west of Interstate 95 to Northeast Second Avenue. Aside from the county housing projects, the project area is a mostly ramshackle collection of aging and sometimes vacant warehouse and industrial buildings, auto-body shops, and empty lots, though a long-established working-class neighborhood of single-family homes sits to its north. Also to the north is the St. Mary's Cathedral church and school.
The development group, which has also purchased commercial property in the vicinity, is now close to concluding deals for a Home Depot, a BJ's Wholesale Club and a major supermarket, Swerdlow said. That would bring commercial space in Swerdlow's portion of the plan to a considerable 370,000 square feet.
In tandem with the AJ Capital properties, he said, the plan will result in a walkable and transit-linked community with a broad range of incomes that can be economically sustainable and support quality amenities and shops. Swerdlow noted that the affordable and public housing units in his buildings will be indistinguishable from the workforce apartments and that all residents will have access to amenities like gyms, gardens and swimming pools.
'We're going to do whatever we can to make this a real neighborhood,' Swerdlow said, adding that having people with a mix of incomes is a superior to the old public-housing model of low-income families isolated in projects. 'It's very important that we have a balanced community. It just works better.'
The developers are awaiting feedback from several more public meetings in the neighborhood before finalizing site plans and building designs, already in the works by Miami-based Arquitectonica. National engineering and design firm Kimley-Horn is working on the Tri-Rail station plan.
The development group is also working with Miami's planning department on adopting the county's Rapid Transit Zone rules, which apply around bus and train stations and allow greater density than the city's Miami 21 zoning plan, Swerdlow said. The county can impose the transit zoning on municipalities, but that has been a source of friction with Miami officials.
Swerdlow, who built the Dolphin Mall in west Miami-Dade, is the rare Miami developer with the reputation and experience to pull off a profitable commercial development combined with significant levels of affordable housing. His group's recently opened Block 55 at Sawyer's Walk, in Miami's historically Black neighborhood of Overtown, blends 578 affordable apartments for seniors with corporate offices, restaurants and big-box shops like Target, Ross and Aldi.
The Overtown project was fully leased before opening and is drawing crowds of shoppers in an area long short of both housing and places to shop.