Four years ago, Justin Podolsky’s proposed massive mixed-use project in Miami’s Little Haiti overcame a major hurdle.
The 5.9 million-square-foot development made it past a city review board in 2021, after delaying voting on it since 2018. The stall was partly due to an outcry from board members and the community over traffic, gentrification and displacement of low-income and middle-income Little Haiti residents.
Getting past the board landed the project, called Sabal Palm Village at Flagler Trail, in front of the Miami commission, marking a milestone in the evaluation process and bringing approval within reach. Only a vote by commissioners remained, and the odds were good. Generally, the Miami commission has been much less harsh than some of the city boards, green-lighting proposals in the past, despite community opposition.
Sabal Palm Village would be a four-phase development with 2,929 residential units; 400 hotel keys; 168,000 square feet of offices; 296,300 square feet of commercial space; 43,800 square feet for a vocational school; 4,782 parking spaces; 195,300 square feet of civic space and 249,000 square feet of open space. It would replace the existing 512-unit Design Place apartment complex on the 22.5-acre site on the southwest corner of Northeast 54th Street and the FEC Railway tracks.
Yet, from 2021 to May, Sabal Palm Village was placed on the commission agenda 11 times –– and mysteriously deferred each time, with little to no discussion by commissioners and zero insight on reasons for the delays, according to The Real Deal’s analysis of city records.
Podolsky’s representative said it is not abnormal. “It’s not atypical for projects like this to go through a process like this start and stop, back and forth,” said Bruce Teitelbaum, who identified himself as Podolsky’s business associate. “There’s nothing unusual.”
Miami commission chair Christine King, whose district includes Little Haiti, declined to comment.
The Podolsky family has a checkered past as infamous landlords in New York, and in recent years have taken their alleged tactics of aggressively pushing out tenants to South Florida.
Records show that SPV Realty, the entity Justin Podolsky uses to own the complex, filed a flurry of evictions at Design Place, including in 2020 when much of Miami’s workforce faced job losses or pay cuts due to the pandemic. Design Place isn’t officially designated affordable or workforce housing, but for years has offered cost-burdened Miamians a reprieve from the city’s ever-rising rents. A two-bedroom Design Place apartment is going for $2,200 to $2,600 a month, Apartments.com shows. That’s less than the typical Miami area rent of $2,749 as of April, according to a Zillow analysis.
How much affordable housing Sabal Palm Village would include has been at the heart of contention at community and board discussions. Over the years, Podolsky changed plans several times. At one point it offered to designate 10 percent of units at workforce rents, and then it tweaked plans to give Design Place renters first priority for 512 of the new apartments at the same rents they pay now.
Why Podolsky hasn’t pushed for final approval remains unclear, yet this much is known: The proposal was destined for difficulty from the start.
Sabal Palm Village 1.0
Podolsky’s SPV Realty affiliate first filed the application for the project, previously called Eastside Ridge, in 2016. It immediately touched off a firestorm.
Gentrification had already started creeping north into Little Haiti from the Wynwood Arts District, with trendy coffee shops opening in retrofitted aging warehouses. Residents of Little Haiti, Palm Grove and nearby neighborhoods were aghast at the project, which originally was slated for eight-story to 28-story towers.
Since then, the plan was tweaked, with the most recent known proposal for 15 buildings, ranging from five stories on the outer edges of the site, and up to 20 stories at the center of the site.
Sabal Palm Village is a special area plan (SAP), a Miami zoning code designation for projects spanning more than 9 abutting acres that gives developers wiggle room on building regulations in exchange for public benefits such as workforce housing, parks or contributions into a city fund for the community. As of 2022, SPV Realty had vowed to give $10 million over the course of development to a city trust fund for job training, home and business improvements, small business growth, educational opportunities, immigration assistance and cultural activities.
The Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board took up the project in 2018 and granted SAP and zoning approval the following year. It then balked at deciding on the necessary land use change, deferring a vote at least nine times from 2018 to 2021.
The board is merely an adviser to the commission, meaning projects can move forward whether the board votes in favor or against. But deferring a decision altogether stalls a project at the planning board.
While the project was in front of the planning board, opponents aired their concerns with Sabal Palm Village over increased traffic congestion and displacement of renters amid Miami’s affordability crisis. Some also were quick to point out the Podolsky family’s reputation as infamous landlords in New York.
In 1984, Stuart and Jay Podolsky, Justin Podolsky’s father and uncle, respectively, pleaded guilty on charges they used “vacaters,” or men hired to assault, rob and bully tenants into leaving Manhattan apartment buildings. Stuart and Jay Podolsky were sentenced to probation, and their father, the late Zenek Podolsky, also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 90 days in jail. More recently, Stuart and Jay Podolsky bought apartments to house the homeless through the city’s cluster-site program, receiving millions of dollars from New York, according to media reports.
Teitelbaum distanced Justin Podolsky from any of his family’s history in New York. “Justin Podolsky is the one managing, operating and running and in complete control of” Sabal Palm Village, Teitelbaum said. “It has nothing to do with Stuart and Jay [Podolsky].” Stuart and Jay Podolsky’s guilty pleas in Manhattan are “ancient, ancient history” that’s irrelevant to the Little Haiti project, he added.
In South Florida, Jay Podolsky and his son, Lee Podolsky, played a lead role in converting a Fort Lauderdale senior living home into luxury apartments, allegedly by pushing out elderly tenants, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported. The Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration cited the Oasis Living Quarters complex for failing to give residents 45 days written notice to move out, which Oasis’ attorneys disputed. Years before tenants had to vacate, many left on their own or wanted to, citing deterioration of services and amenities at Oasis, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
The Podolsky family has a history of owning properties through entities listing family members’ wives as managers, with the entities using the women’s maiden names. Ownership of the new apartments at Oasis traces to Sharon Olson, Jay Podolsky’s wife, the Sun-Sentinel reported.
Records show that SPV Realty is registered to Olson. This year, the property was transferred to two new limited liability companies, both registered to Shirley Reinfeld, Justin Podolsky’s mother, according to records.
“They have nothing to do with the project whatsoever,” Teitelbaum said, calling them passive investors.
In 2019, SPV Realty tried to bypass the numerous Miami planning board deferrals and sued the city. The developer lost the case the following year.
Sabal Palm Village 2.0
Since Sabal Palm passed the planning board in 2021, South Florida’s market has changed dramatically. Elevated interest rates, skyrocketing insurance and still higher construction materials and labor costs have led some developers to pause planned projects. More recently, the Trump administration’s tariffs on steel and aluminum threaten to increase construction costs.
In 2023, the Florida Legislature passed the Live Local Act in an effort to alleviate expensive housing costs. The law, tweaked in 2024 and this year, allows developers to build bigger projects than sites’ zonings permit if they designate at least 40 percent of units for renters earning no more than 120 percent of the area median income. It also rewards developers with property tax breaks.
Miami developers have seized on Live Local with a flurry of project applications for thousands of apartments.
So, did costlier construction costs lead to a pause on Sabal Palm Village? Or could the possibility of a significant increase in Miami’s affordable and workforce housing stock have led Podolsky to reevaluate the amount of below-market rentals he should provide at Sabal Palm?
Sabal Palm Village isn’t the only South Florida project that went through multiple contentious public meetings and surpassed vehement opposition to then stop advancing and fall out of the public eye.
Also in Little Haiti, the Magic City Innovation District has moved slowly after scoring commission approval in 2019. Miami-based Plaza Equity Partners, Montreal-based Lune Rouge, led by Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberté; and Miami-based Dragon Global, led by Bob Zangrillo, are developers of the 8.5 million-square-foot mixed-use project. Since approval, they have focused on street and sidewalk improvements, undergrounding utilities, platting and other infrastructure work on the site that had been overlooked for years, Plaza Equity’s Neil Fairman has said.
The biggest long-deferred project in South Florida is the Ghermezians’ Triple Five Group’s planned American Dream Miami mall in a northwest area of unincorporated Miami-Dade County. As of last year, the developer’s attorney hoped to publicly discuss lifting a ban on county subsidies for the mall.
The project also has been mired in litigation, with Triple Five accusing Graham Companies, which plans a nearby megaproject, of failing to close on a land deal. Miami-Dade now is seeking to enforce a $5 million penalty against Triple Five for missing permitting and construction deadlines.
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