When one of south Miami-Dade County’s sprawling suburbs ends, the landscape changes. Streets of master-planned communities level off into a vast expanse of open land and row crops that stretch into the horizon for a mile and a half, west toward Krome Avenue and Everglades National Park.
This is where, on a nearly 1,000-acre tract, homebuilding giant Lennar wants to build a mega-subdivision: homes, jobs, schools and entertainment.
In business-friendly Miami-Dade, government officials for years have catered to developers in an ongoing bid for new towers, complexes and homes. With real estate a major economic driver and tax base for the county, developers rarely hear no from electeds and sometimes get help to work around difficult sites and zonings.
But even Miami-Dade has its limits. The site Lennar wants to develop, City Park is outside what’s known as the Urban Development Boundary. Past the line, development is strictly banned. This summer Lennar filed its application for 7,800 homes and 2.4 million square feet of commercial space.
Construction beyond the limit may be impossible, but as it turns out, the boundary itself is movable, if a developer can pass county and state administrative reviews, secure a supermajority commission vote and survive a potential mayoral veto, all while environmentalists lobby against the annexation of farmland and wetlands, which creep closer to protected national parks.
It isn’t the first to embark on this quest. A pair of developers won approval to move the line in 2022 — following five public hearings where they capitulated to commissioners’ many demands and halved their project size. But their plan was quashed in court, a warning that even hard-won victories can collapse before the end.
But if Lennar figures it out, City Park would be the single largest proposed project in the area and solidify its remaking of south Miami-Dade. It might also indicate a new upper limit of what developers can pull off here.
The Miami-Dade-based homebuilding giant has honed a machine-like business strategy of “starts, sales, deliveries” that’s made it the country’s second-largest homebuilder — and the dominant force in this corner of the county. Since 2020, Lennar has delivered 8,430 single-family houses and townhomes in south Miami-Dade, nearly 70 percent of all such units built in that period, according to Colliers Research. Currently, it’s building 840 more homes in the area. That accounts for almost 60 percent of the housing stock under construction.
Even without taking the 7,800 residential units of City Park into account, Lennar plans nearly half of the proposed south Miami-Dade units, or 3,569 out of the 7,682 total, the Colliers data shows.
“They are by far dominant,” Ed Easton, founder of Miami-based Easton Group and partner in City Park, said. “I don’t think there’s any question.”
Now, slowing sales and dropping prices, as well as stubbornly elevated construction costs and interest rates, have many pulling back from south Miami-Dade. Yet, Lennar, which also is experiencing a decline in sales and revenue from its nationwide portfolio, is only pressing on.
Home base
During South Florida’s housing boom of the past five years, fueled by an influx of out-of-staters, builders raced south. Far from the construction cranes in Miami’s booming Brickell and Edgewater neighborhoods, Coral Gables’ Mediterranean Revival buildings and Pinecrest’s manicured lawns, south Miami-Dade has one thing those areas don’t: cheap land.
Lennar has been developing in the area, which consists of the municipalities of Homestead and Florida City, as well as unincorporated county neighborhoods such as Leisure City, Naranja, Princeton, Goulds, Redland and South Miami Heights, since at least the early 2000s.
But it ramped up recently. From 2020 to last year, Lennar completed the Siena Reserve community with roughly 1,200 single-family and townhomes spanning across Goulds and Princeton, according to property records. From 2019 to 2022, it completed the Campo Bello community with about 500 homes near Princeton; and from 2021 to last year, it finished Caple Farms North with over 200 homes near Cutler Bay.
The Simpsons-esque subdivisions are easy to spot, with their brand-new streets of cookie-cutter houses — three or four bedrooms, up to 2,000 square feet, selling in the $400,000-to-$600,000 range. Here, working families can have their own backyard and community amenities like pools and gyms.
The late Leonard Miller, a Miami-Dade landowner, sowed the seeds for Lennar’s start here in the 1950s when he leveraged his land and $10,000 to partner with Arnold Rosen’s F&R Builders. By 1971, the pair had renamed the company to Lennar and taken it public. Over the decades, Lennar grew not just through its efficient homebuilding but also by acquiring existing homebuilders, giving it a nationwide foothold, and expanding its business lines into mortgage lending, title and insurance services, as well as a LenX proptech arm during the smart homes craze in 2018. The company’s mantra is “evolve or die,” Stuart Miller, Leonard Miller’s son, famously said. The younger Miller took the helm of Lennar in 1997 and leads the firm as co-CEO with Jon Jaffe. Leonard Miller died in 2002.
“By having [developable land] on someone else’s balance sheet, you are freeing your cash flow to do whatever you do best. Lennar is best at being very efficient in building again and again and again.”
Lennar also seized on down markets, spinning off distressed commercial mortgage investment arms LNR and Rialto Capital, eventually divesting its majority stake in both. It also launched multifamily division Quarterra, which it still owns.
In Miami-Dade, the Miller family has a reputation as top benefactors, with Stuart and his siblings, Leslie and Jeffrey, continuing their parents’ legacy, including for homeless and medical research causes. (University of Miami’s medical school was named for Leonard Miller, following a historic $100 million gift from the family in 2004.)
For all its scale, Lennar has kept a low profile. Unlike many Miami builders who spotlight every project milestone, Lennar rarely trumpets its projects beyond email blasts about planned or completed communities. The company declined to make a representative available for this story and generally hasn’t responded to sporadic The Real Deal inquiries over the past couple of years regarding projects. Not all the press is good: Allegations of shoddy construction have been the most persistent blemish on Lennar’s reputation, especially after Category 5 Hurricane Andrew pummeled south Miami-Dade in 1992 and homeowners alleged poor construction that failed to meet the state code. The homebuilder settled homeowners’ class action suit for $2.4 million, denying any wrongdoing.
Lennar’s move on south Miami-Dade also doesn’t seem to have been explicitly announced or addressed, publicly or internally.
“I don’t ever recall having that specific discussion, saying, ‘Hey, we are going to target south Dade,” Anthony Seijas, a former regional VP at Lennar in the early 2000s, said. “It started building communities in Homestead when I was there. It just became a natural progression [to] where there’s land to build master-planned communities.”
Amid the rush on south Miami-Dade, development sites large enough for master-planned communities dwindled, leaving one area as the obvious place for Lennar to turn to: outside the UDB. The 990-acre site where City Park is proposed is “adjacent to the Urban Development Boundary, making it the natural next place for growth,” a project spokesperson said.
In the meantime, Lennar had done smaller projects within the UDB: In Redland, a proposed 97 homes; in the Goulds area, a project of 138 homes and another nearby with 54 homes; and in South Miami Heights, a complex with 24 single-family homes.
How to build a resi empire
But Lennar’s residential empire in south Miami-Dade rests less on bricks and mortar than on savvy land tactics. The builder has locked in developable sites for years ahead, cementing its near-monopoly and its main role in the future of the area’s housing market.
Take the palm nursery in Princeton, a half mile from the development boundary.The homebuilder doesn’t own the land for a planned development where Lennar wants to build 257 homes.
Yet, in a move typical for the firm, Lennar knows it can have the land when it wants it. In June, TPG Angelo Gordon paid $30.2 million for the property, not to own it, but rather to hold it for Lennar until it’s ready to build, records show.
As such, TPG Angelo Gordon, a private equity firm, acts as a land bank for Lennar, purchasing, holding and preparing sites for construction until Lennar is ready to buy the plots and start building. Lennar’s other land bank partners include New York-based JEN Partners, which paid $19.6 million for a 19-acre site planned for 302 homes in Princeton; and Scottsdale, Arizona-based Garrett Development, which paid $20.4 million for the 39-acre Florida City site where Lennar is now developing Le Jardine townhouse complex with 527 homes.
In the biggest nod to its strategy, Lennar this year spun off Millrose Properties, its own publicly traded land bank that enables the homebuilders’ land-light strategy. Lennar put $5.5 billion worth of its land holdings and $1 billion in cash into Millrose. Through Millrose, Lennar already has expanded its south Miami-Dade development site stockpile.
In essence, Lennar outsources land ownership — the riskiest part of its empire building.
“By having [developable land] on someone else’s balance sheet, you are freeing your cash flow to do whatever you do best. Lennar is best at being very efficient in building again and again and again,” Eli Beracha, a professor of real estate and finance at Florida International University, said.
The math is simple but powerful: Homebuilders pay a 15 percent to 20 percent deposit of the cost to land banks to get homesites ready for development. They also sign agreements to purchase the land. If it costs $100,000 to get 50 lots ready for development, a homebuilder working without a land bank ties up $5 million upfront just for the site preparation. But if the homebuilder uses a land bank, it would only pay $1 million to the land bank to get the lots ready (20 percent of the total cost) and then will have the rest of its capital free for construction, a land bank expert explained.
For Lennar, it’s as much about efficiency as it is about optics. Because its land is off its books and sits with land banks, its financials look leaner to shareholders and its stock price isn’t weighed down by non-income producing assets, Frank Schnidman, a retired economic development and urban planning professor at Florida Atlantic University, explained.
“They are basically playing a shell game to move the property around to best benefit their balance sheet,” he said.
The land, and Lennar’s obligation to buy it from land banks, isn’t hidden from shareholders, just less obvious, Beracha said.
“Of course it is a little bit less transparent of what is not on the balance sheet, so the shareholders need to be a little bit more sophisticated and realize … they [Lennar] have a separate liability,” he said. “It’s a common practice.”
South Florida homebuilders generally focus on specific areas, in a way unofficially divvying up the tri-county region among themselves. While Kolter, Pulte and Kenco are primarily in parts of Palm Beach County, south Miami-Dade has long been the turf for Lennar and, for a long time, Arlington, Texas-based D.R. Horton.
Although many south Miami-Dade market watchers call both Lennar and D.R. Horton the area’s top players, data show D.R. Horton trailing Lennar by far. D.R. Horton completed 16 percent of the pipeline in the past half decade, and is responsible for 23 percent of the under-construction and proposed pipeline, the Colliers data shows.
“Lennar is on the march,” one south Miami-Dade tropical fruit farmer said, declining to be identified because he has a pending offer on his land from Lennar. “D.R. Horton was around a lot but they have backed way off. They [Lennar] are gobbling up land everywhere you turn. There’s not a person down there with land in the right area that they haven’t run an offer by.”
Many south Miami-Dade farmers and nursery owners, with land holdings both inside and outside the UDB, aren’t too keen to sell to Lennar, he said: Farmers want to be farmers. But sometimes, the economics of farming forces them to enter sale agreements with homebuilders.
Landowners and residents are often against pushing the UDB, the tropical fruit farmer said. People there just “like the low density.”
One local landowner and developer cautioned his peers against entering sale agreements with any homebuilders.
The landowners are often locked into agreements and prices years before the homebuilder closes the deal, and by the time the builder buys, values may have soared — yet the farmer is bound to the old price, according Lewis Swezy, a south Miami-Dade landowner and affordable housing developer.
“A lot of these people aren’t sophisticated sellers and they lock them in,” Swezy said.
Boundary politics
Sometime in the 1980s, Easton, Lennar’s partner in City Park, suggested to Leonard Miller that they purchase the land outside the boundary as a long-term investment. During the subsequent years, they assembled it in clumps, according to Easton.
“We didn’t really talk about developing it at the time,” Easton said.
In 2007, Lennar and Easton first filed a proposed project on the site, at the time called Parkland, with nearly 7,000 homes, a hospital and medical offices, retail, schools, warehouses and parks. By 2008, the project fizzled out after Miami-Dade administrators recommended denial, and the developers asked for a deferral of a commission vote, county records show. A City Park spokesperson cited the onset of the Great Financial Crisis.
The new City Park is a refreshed redesign of Parkland, a project spokesperson said.
It would consist of the 144-acre Village Core with shops, restaurants, a plaza and boardwalk; retail and offices; civic spaces; schools for up to 3,800 students and 250 acres of parks, lakes, a community farm and trails. The industrial space will include last-mile distribution centers and potentially support expected aerospace growth at nearby Miami Executive Airport.
Lennar and its project partners, Easton and homebuilding consultant Bill Albers, are in the early stages of approvals, a process that could drag into next year. Following their pre-application in July, they will file a formal application in the coming weeks, the project spokesperson said. Then, they will meet with commissioners, environmental groups, community members and other stakeholders, and will potentially fine-tune the proposal. Commissioners will vote several times, first on whether to transmit the application to the state.
Contention over the project is typical for Miami-Dade: build housing for the growing population or preserve remaining farmland.
Proponents say City Park would be a self-sustaining community and alleviate demand for attainably priced homes, especially for locals priced out of other areas. There would be 4,500 townhomes and 2,200 multifamily/live-work units, and 1,000 single-family homes. About 12.5 percent will be at workforce price or rents, which includes more than 300 affordable units.
Close to 30,000 county residents are leaving annually, according to Jeffrey Bercow, a land use attorney for the City Park developers, often because they’re priced out. Others make long commutes from affordable suburbs. City Park could be a place for people to work, as well as live, the project spokesperson underscores.
Skeptics aren’t convinced. “It would be a huge, huge mistake” Miami-Dade Commissioner Roberto Gonzalez, whose district includes the City Park site, said, adding the planned office space isn’t “enough” to create an employment hub. “What we need is something that can alleviate traffic. Not more homes.”
The project would continue a decadeslong practice of poor urban planning in Miami-Dade where homes are on one side of the county and jobs and entertainment on the other, causing traffic congestion, Gonzalez added. Developers also should consider land in the Urban Expansion Area, or the area that’s designated for construction first before building elsewhere outside the UDB, Gonzalez said.
Many south Miami-Dade farmers and nursery owners aren’t too keen to sell to Lennar … farmers want to be farmers. But sometimes, the economics of farming forces them to enter sale agreements with homebuilders.
“Our internal rules make clear that we should not build outside that line [UDB] unless there is a need. There is no need,” added Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins.
Some environmentalists and preservationists argue that infill development, or building on developable sites on the right side of the UDB, is the best way to meet the housing needs of a growing population.
The county has land for about 230,000 residential units — with about 10 percent of that suitable for single-family homes and the rest for rentals, townhouses and condos. That’s not enough, Bercow said.
“The demand for single-family homes is pretty steady at about 5,500 units per year,” he said. “And with a 23,000 [single-family home] capacity, you are out in five years.”
The would-be City Park site has no wetlands or other environmentally sensitive lands. Still, redeveloping it could destroy “valuable productive agriculture … battering” Miami-Dade’s endangered farming economy, according to Hold the Line, a longtime coalition of environmental groups that opposes most expansions beyond the boundary. A joint county-University of Florida 2023 study recommended keeping the UDB intact to preserve agricultural land.
Currently, the City Park land is leased for row crops and isn’t part of the tropical fruit and nursery farms that the UF study listed “as most critical to protect,” a project spokesperson said.
Shaky ground
For all the building, the south part of the county is still “less tested” of an area, broker Sebastian Faerman said. “You speak with new developers coming from outside Florida and they don’t know it.”
When the real estate market slowed in recent months, some developers who had tried south Miami-Dade during the boom listed their sites for sale, walking back on their southbound exploration, Faerman said.
How much demand there is for homes in south Miami-Dade is also an open question, as the area is devoid from employment and entertainment hubs. Yet, because homebuilders can purchase land for cheap, they also can offer more attainable prices, providing residents priced out of most of Miami-Dade an alternative to leaving the county.
“It’s a very difficult choice for working families. They either buy an affordable single-family home in a community in south Dade and then drive for an hour or two to their workplace, or they move into a rental or a condominium multifamily project, which doesn’t give them the same kind of amenities and space and community feeling they want,” Bercow, the attorney, said.
“Or they move out of Miami-Dade County.”
In the third quarter, Lennar reported a 9 percent drop in home sale revenues nationwide, as well as a drop in the average home sale price. As the top south Miami-Dade developer, the firm is most exposed to a slowdown in the local housing market. Yet if anyone can weather a downturn, it’s Lennar, onlookers say, pointing to the Great Recession.
“This is home base for them, so they understand this market probably better than anybody,” David Burstyn, a Miami-Dade affordable housing developer and investor, said. “Stuart Miller is an industry genius. He knows what he is doing. He knows how to navigate a ship better than anybody.”
