Ghost-Town-Down-Town

1st Street, Downtown Miami, Fl

One of the neighborhoods in Miami that is growing really fast is Downtown, with some massive developments like the Paramount, All aboard Florida and 1000 Museum, it wont take much longer for the entire urban fabric to grow. Even though the neighborhood will develop for sure, developers and planners are not seeing the bigger picture, or the bigger issue; if you have ever seen the downtown area from afar at night, you will see that all these high end buildings are 70-80% empty (by the lights of the condos) meaning these even though they have been purchased, they’re rarely used since their part of the countless properties owned by wealthy owners.

This effect might be desired for developers who just care about creating feasible projects but its really bad for the development of a community because a place like Downtown needs some momentum, people living there, purchasing at the stores, walking on the streets, etc to fully develop and to create a diversified neighborhood, not just a ¨Ghost town ¨of the rich as said by Vincent Signorello in this article. Another problem with this is that by building only high end condos, the land prices skyrocket, making it only feasible to continue doing these kind of projects and therefore a domino effect is created making it impossible for other types of developments and communities to enter the neighborhood.

We need to start taking all of this factors into account and start offering incentives for different types of projects to be created in Downtown that drive different types of tenants to it if we want to avoid it to still be a ghost town of a neighborhood and start being relevant when compared with other Downtown areas of similar cities.