Stand with North Miami: Protect Our Community

Hi, I am Hernando Barreto, a resident of North Miami City, and I have been working with our community for more than 2 years to protect our way of life and our neighborhood in North Miami from aggressive over-development. Our neighborhood is located in a corner triangle of Sans Souci (French for 'without worry'), a quiet and tranquil neighborhood in front of Biscayne Bay that includes Sans single-family homes, Collonade townhouse condominium, and Majorca Towers, the only high-rise condominium of 14 floors in the area. There are about 400 households in the area.

See press coverage in Local 10 News

Main concerns from the community to oppose aggressive overdevelopment in the neighborhood were related to the inadequate infrastructure for that kind of projects in an area developed more than 60 years ago with narrow streets, insufficient drainage system that would exacerbate congestion, heavy traffic, propensity for flooding, and safety related to the adjacent building of Majorca that could be structurally compromised due to ground deformation, soil instability, and groundwater changes as it could happen as one of the factors considered in the case of the collapse of Chaplain Towers, right across the bay.

In 2022, the city started the review and discussion of the latest North Miami Comprehensive Plan (2045) with the community and the City Council members. After multiple meetings of the community with City Council members and staff that listened to the strong opposition of the community to a controversial request by some developers to increase the overall height in the zoning code from 115' to 400', especially for the BZ Zone (3 parcels in North Bay Shore Drive between 122 St Road and 123 St), the City Council approved the Comprehensive Plan in its first reading on August 26, rejecting the extreme height change proposed by developers and keeping the maximum height at 115' (11 floors).

One year later, in August 2023, Alta Developers presented to the community a project to develop a 21-floor building (18 above and 3 underground) with 96 units on a small lot of only 0.76 acres, and many members of the community expressed their concerns and opposition to such an aggressive project. Despite strong opposition, Alta filed an application for a variance to the Board of Adjustment (BOA) requesting to allow a "variance" to increase the maximum height from 115' to 203', and wrongly, the BOA approved such zoning variance.

We, using our own resources and time with the support of many others in the community, appealed such wrong approval of the BOA in front of the City Council on Feb 27, 2024, which gave us the reason, approving the appeal and rejecting the BOA approval to Alta Developer for property at 11950 N Bayshore Drive.

Despite those facts, the attorney for the real estate developers from the powerful Holland & Knight firm, knowing that such variance was not legal, filed another similar variance application with the BOA on behalf of the developer Continuum Company to increase the height from 115' to 238'10" for a project at 12000 N Bayshore Dr (contiguous to the previous).

After the City Council confirmed that an increase in height limits was not allowed by application of variance, the same attorney on behalf of Continuum Company filed an application to change the Zoning code of the City as per the Comprehensive plan for a Text Amendment allowing developers to build in this neighborhood up to 24 floors (238' 10"), which was reviewed in the first reading on June 11, 2024, but only got 3 approving votes, failing to receive the supermajority of 4 out of 5 votes as required by the City.

Knowing that they would require a supermajority with 4 positive votes to get the Text Amendment for changing zoning BZ, the Holland & Knight attorneys came up with the outrageous strategy to change the Land Development Regulations (LDR) for the City of North Miami and filed another Text Amendment removing the supermajority requirement to make Text Amendments to the LDR. That application was rejected by the City Council.

As a last resort, the questionable tactics of the Holland & Knight attorneys designed another way to remove the supermajority, mounting a tactic to create a recusal of the Councilwoman for District #2 who voted against the Text Amendment for changing zoning in some parcels of the BZ zone. The recusal incident in the City Council meeting of Sep 11 and then Sep 24 meeting came suddenly with no clear disclosure, creating an obscure environment for the vote. The proposal passed with 3 votes in favor in violation of the supermajority rule, and therefore we opposed and denounced the deceptive tactic used by the attorneys of the real estate developer, but they were ignored by the city attorney who advised the Council members to continue the process, ignoring the supermajority rule.

With that questioned and maybe illegal Text Amendment, the real estate developer Continuum Company went ahead and filed for a Conditional Use Permit (CUP), disregarding entirely the community to the point that not even community benefits were offered to the impacted neighbor community. The CUP was approved on November 26 City Council meeting, leaving no other resource to the community that appealed that decision in the 11th Circuit Court.

One of the possible calculations of the developers and Holland Knight attorneys was that our community would not be able to afford the fees for an attorney to represent and help us to go to court, and therefore they forced on us misleading arguments and misrepresentations in a typical Goliath (developers) versus David (community) situation.

Notwithstanding, we were able to secure legal representation to file in court a Writ of Certiorari petition challenging the CUP approved Nov 26. We kindly ask the community to make their donations here to ensure proper legal representation of our community to defend our rights in court.

Funds will be used to pay attorney fees.

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