February 17, 2003
Section: Local
Edition: Final
Page: 1B
CONDO TOWER REGARDED AS BOON TO MIAMI BUT A BANE TO NEIGHBORS
ANDRES VIGLUCCI, aviglucci@herald.com
The planned Seybold Pointe condo tower is, in some ways, everything the city of Miami might want in a development project: an attractive design next to a Metrorail station, a solid piece of new private investment in a once-rundown area along the Miami River that now teeters on the edge of a comeback.
Only things aren't quite so straightforward.
The project has generated bitter opposition from preservationists, back-to-the-city urbanists and low-income residents in the historic neighborhood, who say the last thing their fledgling urban renaissance needs is a 12-story condo looming over their modestly scaled homes.
This is not the usual not-in-my-backyard scrap.
The 96-unit Seybold Pointe tower would cast a tall shadow over the quaint riverside district of Spring Garden and its twin-domed signature home, known as the Hindu Temple, which sits directly across the street - and also over an adjacent block of recently built Habitat for Humanity houses, whose owners are among its angriest opponents.
"I hate it, I hate it, I hate it," said Georgia Miller, who shares a pastel-blue, 3-year-old house at the other end of the block from the condo site with her daughter and grandchildren. "My daughter and myself helped build this house. We put in windows, insulation. We put on a roof. It was a pleasure to do it. I worked so hard and then this comes along. You know what it's going to make our little houses look like?"
The clash highlights conflicts the city is facing with increasing frequency as it attempts to foster redevelopment in and around some of its oldest - and often long-neglected - neighborhoods.
Proposed new developments in or next to long-established neighborhoods - usually bigger and taller than what came before - have already led to battles between developers and residents in well-to-do areas like Morningside and Brickell, in some cases forcing projects to be scaled back or jettisoned altogether.
POISED TO WIN
In relatively less affluent Spring Garden, blocks from the Metro Justice Building and the Jackson Memorial Hospital medical complex, the developer appears poised to win, in large part because he is not requesting zoning variances or special permits that would require public hearings or City Commission votes.
Condo developer Albert Milo Jr., president of The Urban Development Group, said he did everything by the book. Although the zoning allows him to build 150 units on the one-acre site, he is building just 96, a fact that he wishes residents would appreciate.
"We felt that was a happy medium," Milo said.
The project, he said, will help stabilize the neighborhood and provide a needed amenity - a corner deli or cafe "that will be a focal point for Spring Garden, a place to socialize, which they don't have now."
Spring Garden is a tiny pocket of a neighborhood, shaped like a triangle and extending over one-third of a square mile. It presses against the Miami River, between Northwest 12th and Seventh avenues, and retreats along the westward curve of the Seybold Canal. Its northern boundary is Northwest 11th Street.
But residents say their fight is not over the fact of development, which they welcome, but over its character and scale and how much say they have in determining what gets built.
So far, they say, they have been shut out.
"There has to be some development, or it's going to stay crack houses and vacant land from here to downtown Miami," said Spring Garden resident Tamme Flood. "But there has to be a way for him to design it that fits better with the neighborhood.
"We're like a petri dish for this urban revitalization. We took a chance on this area because we liked it. But this guy has no thought for the good of the neighborhood. That's what's been happening in Miami for years. And it's got to stop."
After shunning them for months, members of the Spring Garden Civic Association say, Milo met with the group two weeks ago only under pressure from Miami-Dade Commissioner Barbara Carey-Shuler, and then offered only token concessions like better plant cover.
Carey-Shuler, whose district encompasses Spring Garden, said she will keep pressure on Milo to make compromises by withholding a $500,000 county subsidy for the project from commission consideration. The subsidy would help moderate-income families buy 15 units at his condo, where prices begin at $120,000.
"I don't want to support something where the neighborhood is upset," Carey-Shuler said, noting she has no other authority over development inside city boundaries.
City officials, in turn, say there is little they can do about the scale of Seybold Pointe. The planned tower conforms to the existing zoning, which predates the Habitat homes and the establishment of the adjoining historic district.
"There is nothing specific we can enforce," said Otto Boudet, an advisor on development to Miami Mayor Manny Diaz. "You're going to have struggles with properties like this. But it's going to add housing to an area that needs it."
However, Boudet said the city has begun a broad review of zoning and planning that should ease future neighborhood-versus-development conflicts. The goal, Boudet said, is to devise a citywide plan that balances new building with neighborhood preservation.
ONE PROPOSAL
One measure already approved would create "neighborhood conservation districts" to protect older areas from intrusive development. One such district has been proposed for the area where the Seybold Pointe condo would sit along with the adjoining Highland Park neighborhood, one of Miami's earliest.
But a high-rise residential development boom is racing ahead of the city's planning effort. With land along Biscayne Bay and Brickell virtually swallowed up by high-rises, developers are looking along the river and other places where little development has occurred in decades.
That's what Milo said drew him to the area - available land close to public transit, with many potential buyers among the thousands of people who work nearby at hospitals and the Miami-Dade County justice center.
His company has three other condo projects planned for the adjoining Civic Center, Milo said - precisely the kind of development that county and city officials are trying to encourage as an alternative to suburban sprawl.
Some local residents do embrace his condo plan, among them Krassi Ivanov, owner of the Hindu Temple, the 1919 home of Spring Garden developer John Seybold.
The condo would dwarf Ivanov's house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, but he said he doesn't mind. Calling condo opponents "crazy," Ivanov, who owns several neighborhood properties, said he sees no point in fighting a developer who has the legal right to build.
"What can you do? Anything is better than what we have now," he said, pointing to the rundown warehouse that occupies the condo site.
But residents say Seybold Pointe would not be allowed if not for a quirk of history.
One of the last largely intact single-family neighborhoods in inner-city Miami, Spring Garden comprises 174 homes, many dating to the late 1910s, and many carefully renovated.
HISTORIC PROTECTION
Historic designation, granted in 1997, protects most of the homes from significant alteration or demolition, and would bar a condo tower inside district boundaries.
But the condo site is just outside it, in a part of Spring Garden where not enough historic buildings survived to warrant legal protection. The condo site, across the street from the Culmer Metrorail station, is one of the few slivers of land in the area zoned to allow it.
Residents have welcomed the owners of 29 Habitat for Humanity homes built in the area in the past three years, including six on the Seybold Pointe block.
"It's a real neighborhood, a very embracing neighborhood," Flood said.
And, she and others contend, no place for a condo tower and the traffic it will generate.
The tower's three-story parking garage would directly overlook the side yard and living-room window of Ellen Sibblies' Habitat home. Its single exit would disgorge cars right by another Habitat home's front yard.
A NEIGHBOR'S REQUEST
Sibblies said she asked Milo for a buffering wall, but he responded dismissively.
"His attitude was very funky," she said. "Like he felt maybe a Habitat person was below him."
Milo said he was respectful. He said he asked residents to submit requests for small modifications like better landscaping in writing, but has not received a response.
That's because the association recently voted to reject Milo's offer and formally oppose the condo. Prominent Miami lawyer George Knox, a former city attorney and one-time Spring Garden resident, has agreed to help.
Ironically, association leaders say, the only recourse they may have is to fight the $500,000 county subsidy, even though they would welcome new moderate-income residents like themselves.
"Sure, Milo is within his rights to build this," said Spring Garden resident Eileen Marcial Broton, "but this is not easily repaired once it happens. You can, but should you? That is really the question."
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