Remaking South Florida in the vertical image: developer Jorge Perez

Every time I drive through Sunny Isles Beach, I see an advertisement wrapped around the front of the Trump Towers project. It is a glossy black and white photo of four smug developers marring a perfectly good chain-link fence for about half a block. The men are the decidedly un-photogenic Dezers (Michael and toadlike son Gil) as well as the follically challenged Donald Trump and Jorge Perez.

I always think, why don’t they just slap pictures of their genitalia on there and be done with it? The message would be the same. Sunny Isles Beach is a travesty of overdevelopment. These four men, Jorge Perez in particular, are responsible for turning a sleepy and dilapidated but charming beach town into a glittering canyon of inaccessible glass and steel.

Sunny Isles used to be full of wonderfully weird nooks and crannies, ’50s and ’60s-era hotels with neat bars, strange little Russian restaurants and, of course, the excellent Rascal House. The deli is still there, but not for long. Since the tiny area incorporated in 1997, it’s been a bonanza for town coffers and no doubt some of its public officials.

I understand the concept of branding, which is what the Trump/Perez/Dezer shtick is all about, but one has to consider that they’re not just branding a building. They’re branding a community. What we as a community allow to happen through planning and zoning decisions determines the social and psychological topography of a place as much as its physical development.

As I was musing on this recently, I read an article in the South Florida Business Journal about how Related Group CEO Jorge Perez is considering creating a vulture investment fund to buy up distressed condo units at fire-sale prices. Of course it makes perfect business sense. But it’s also one of those things that makes you feel icky inside when you think about how many times officials in the cities of Miami, Miami Beach, Sunny Isles Beach and other places have sprained if not broken the public trust just to shoehorn in yet another Related Group project.

The RG is by far the big dog in town. Some have compared Perez’s impact in our era to that of founding developers Carl Fisher, George Merrick and Glenn Curtiss. If that’s true, what exactly does that mean for the Miami of the future? Each of those previous developers had a hand in creating communities that owe much to their design. Will Perez be judged by the legacy of a Coral Gables, a Miami Beach or a Hialeah?

Perez started his career as a planner for the city of Miami. In 1979, he parlayed those contacts into a lucrative little business in affordable housing. When the post-coke bust cycle of the ’80s and early ’90s came around again to full speed ahead, Perez’s company reinvented itself as a top builder of luxury condos. The company’s revenues ballooned from about $500 million in 2000 to nearly three times that number within this decade. Perez himself is worth something like $1.8 billion.

One of the obvious differences between Perez and the egomaniacal visionaries of the past is that they were building on a clean slate. There wasn’t much but swamp and plantations before them. Perez is marking his territory by destroying what is here to build something new. In some places, like derelict downtown Miami, that’s a welcome change. In others, not so much.

To illustrate this point, I looked back at Related’s footprint in just the last year. Here’s a quick peek:

April 2007: The Miami City Commission approved 3-2 the zoning for three Related Group condos to be built next to Mercy Hospital and Vizcaya. Coconut Grove activists had fought the decision for months, arguing that the project was way out of scale and would visually impact a historic landmark. But the Related Group prevailed, after hiring two confidants of Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones to, as Perez put it, “sell the project, particularly to black community leaders and black community business people.” One of these handy community outreach people received “less than $50,000” while the other got “between $50,000 and $100,000.”

The company also hired consultants who paid various residents of the Black Grove $100 a pop to don yellow T-shirts and sit in the commission chambers for hours to buffer the three commissioners who were going to vote for the project from angry hordes of Grove activists.
May 2007: The Miami City Commission issued a collective D’oh! after a city audit revealed that they gave The Related Group a million-dollar subsidy for affordable housing in 2003. For some reason, the city (as well as the county in a $300,000 deal) never required the developer to restrict Loft One condo sales to buyers with lower incomes who intended to live there. As a result, many of the buyers turned out to be well-off investors, who turned around and flipped the units for tidy profits. Some of the buyers were, shockingly, City Hall insiders.

August 2007: News stories emerged revealing that the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office was looking into matters surrounding the April vote.

September 2007: The Related Group sued the troublesome Vizcayans for being big fat gossip queens. The company also sued Miami Commissioner Marc Sarnoff for writing a secret memo to himself about them.

November 2007: The Related Group blew up the Sheraton Bal Harbour, once one of the more recognizable examples of MiMo architecture (it opened as the Americana in 1956, designed by Morris Lapidus) to make room for yet another luxury hotel/condo project.

In other who-needs-history news, The Related Group’s protracted battle with activists in Fort Lauderdale entered a final chapter when supporters of the historic Stranahan House lost their appeal of a judge’s rejection of their challenges to the proposed Icon high-rise. Pending negotiation, Icon could be the tallest building in the city, built next to the oldest in Broward County.

December 2007: A Miami Herald public records suit resulted in the release of the secret Sarnoff memo, in which he said he was told that Spence-Jones was essentially paid for her vote. Also, word leaked out that New York-based Related Cos. Chairman Stephen Ross and Related Group Chairman Perez may buy part of the Miami Dolphins for $900 million.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.