Well, the state of affairs in what Zalewski dubs "greater downtown Miami" has grown only worse.
Now, according to a new
"It is worth noting this report only tracks those Greater Downtown Miami condos formally listed for sale. The report does not factor in the nearly 47,500 new condo units currently in the development pipeline east of Interstate 95 in the tricounty South Florida region," Zalewski's study ominously notes.
Though Zalewski's estimates fluctuate from season to season, the overall trend is clear: Miami's real-estate development community and public officials have approved a truly absurd number of new luxury condo projects pitched at global investors rather than actual Miami residents.
Naturally, it's pretty impossible to pump that much supply into a city's real-estate ecosystem without prices collapsing — and Zalewski says elsewhere on his website that the condo market is "slumping" and undergoing a "correction." Importantly, the housing market overall does not seem to be slumping.
As New Times wrote last time Zalewski released a similar dataset, the information shows that Miami's real-estate market simply is not designed to benefit working residents. Given the high price of land in Miami-Dade County, it's more profitable for developers to target global investors and rich vacationers who want to either stash and/or launder money in the United States or purchase a third, fourth, or fifth vacation home they can leave empty 49 weeks of the year.
In the meantime, studies on working-class housing affordability in Miami remain as grim as ever. Restaurant workers can't afford 99 percent of Miami-area housing. Miamians need to earn $50,000 to afford two-bedroom apartments. And waiting lists for affordable-housing units are often years long and include thousands of applicants.