A massive redevelopment in Miami’s Little Haiti is scaled back, but it’s still blocked

After a three-year standoff with critics, developers behind a plan for a controversial mixed-use project covering 23 acres on the edge of Miami’s Little Haiti have submitted a ‘“reimagined” and scaled-back but still massive proposal to the city — and they again ran into a wall of community skepticism at a public hearing Wednesday night.

After an hour of debate and sometimes acrimonious testimony, the city’s Planning and Zoning Advisory Board voted 7-3 to once again postpone a vote on the proposed special area plan, originally known as Eastside Ridge but now rebranded as Sabal Palm Village at Flagler Trail, until September.

The board, which has deferred a vote on the plan more than a half-dozen times, decided not to allow New York-based owners SPV Realty to make a presentation on their retooled plan on Wednesday after area residents objected, saying they had not seen it and were not ready to discuss it. City planners, meanwhile, pushed for a presentation but also asked for a deferral, acknowledging they had not had a chance to analyze it yet, either.

SPV has been seeking sweeping zoning and land-use changes to raze and redevelop 500 aging apartments at a complex named Design Place, which dates to the 1940s and remains an island of relative affordability in a fast-gentrifying area. They would be replaced with a mini-city of more expensive apartments, offices, shops and a hotel, with towers as tall as 20 stories. Sabal Palm Village is the original name of the old apartment complex, which sits on the southern border of Little Haiti at Northwest 54th Street.

Although the zoning board only makes recommendations to the Miami commission, a development proposal can’t move forward until the advisory panel takes a yea or nay vote.

But the board has consistently declined to make a final recommendation as SPV and its representatives resisted members’ demands that they hold community meetings, address traffic concerns and look to lessen the project’s impact on adjacent low-scale neighborhoods. SPV sued the board and city to force a vote, but lost in court.

SPV did finally accede to hold meetings, and has hosted eight in May, including two live forums. That followed a pair of lightly attended Zoom meeting in October. But community members still told the board outreach has been insufficient and “spotty,” and they were caught unawares by the revised proposal, submitted to the city in early May.

“We were not aware,” said prominent Haitian-American activist Marleine Bastien. “We haven’t been invited to any meetings. We don’t have anything in writing. We weren’t even aware of the name change.”

SPV’s new attorney, Melissa Tapanes Llahues, unsuccessfully pleaded with the board for a chance to present the new plan and get a vote on it so it could move to the city commission. She said the changes address concerns raised by critics in the community and on the planning board and outline an improved suite of “public benefits.”

The revised plan, she said, is “less intense in all kind of impacts, and the public benefits package is more robust and better spelled out,” she said. “No harm will be done by presenting.”

But a majority of board members said they preferred to allow members of the public and city planners to digest the changes and be ready to discuss them in one hearing Sept. 14 rather than drag it out in piecemeal fashion.

In a letter to the city and a revised regulating plan, SPV outlined some significant revisions that Tapanes Llahues told the board reduce heights, scale and massing of proposed buildings.

Among other changes, the redesigned version reduces the number of proposed dwelling units from 3,300 to 2,929 and cuts the original office space plan of 300,000 square feet by nearly half. It also reduces commercial retail space by 200,000 square feet, to just under 300,000 square feet, but increases proposed hotel rooms from 240 to 400.

It also proposes community benefits that include a two-acre public park, reconnected roadways now blocked by Design Place’s perimeter wall and a possible vocational or community college facility. In addition, SPV is proposing to build the first phase of a proposed cycling and pedestrian “Flagler Trail” along the border of its property and the adjacent Florida East Coast Railway line.

The developers also propose to provide affordable housing — a big sticking point in the debate over the proposal — but details aren’t clear. SPV had previously promised to set aside 315 new apartments as “workforce housing” affordable to working people and invest $10 million in an unspecified community fund.

The board’s deferral makes it almost certain that the plan will be an issue in the upcoming November election for the district seat covering Little Haiti. The plan is now unlikely to come before the commission until after voters have filled the seat, occupied by appointed interim commissioner Jeffrey Watson after Keon Hardemon quit to run successfully for the Miami-Dade Commission.