During the height of Miami’s high season, between November and January, folks line up around the block outside Zak the Baker to pick up loaves of freshly baked sourdough bread or to sit down for a cup of coffee.
But for the seven other months of the year, on any given weekday, “you can stand outside and not see a single person walk by for 20 minutes,” Zak Stern, owner of the 11-year-old bakery in Wynwood, told The Real Deal.
“It can be extremely quiet in the off season,” Stern said. “And then we have peaks when we are very busy like during Art Basel or the holidays. But there’s no consistent, all day flow of people.”
The inconsistency in foot traffic fuels Stern’s belief that asking retail rents on Wynwood’s most popular streets, where landlords are seeking $100 or more a square foot, are not justified, and are pricing out homegrown tenants.
“The foot traffic needs to be reliable,” Stern said. “There needs to be morning commuters, lunchtime crowds, afternoon shoppers, early evening diners and weekenders. You can’t [rely on paying] your rent during the peaks. It’s going to take some time, and it’s going to take some work.”
Stern recalled when Wynwood felt like it was on an upward trajectory, with buses of tourists shuttled from Miami Beach and year‑over‑year momentum for the arts-and-food scene. In his view, that climb stalled because the basics never got built: tree canopy, shade, plazas and calmer streets that make walking appealing in Miami’s heat.
Newly built mixed-use projects with ground-floor retail spaces sparked a spike in Wynwood’s retail and restaurant rents, but small business owners like Stern say the neighborhood’s uneven, event‑driven foot traffic and harsh pedestrian environment make paying triple digits hard to pencil out. Yet, landlords and brokers don’t want to hear it. They argue that surging visitor counts, record condo pricing and limited walkable districts in Miami justify today’s rents.
Last year, J. Wakefield Brewing, a craft beer joint that had been in Wynwood for a decade, closed shop. Owner Jonathan Wakefield told Eater at the time that “rising rents, coupled with reduced foot traffic and street closures due to construction, made it nearly impossible” to stay in business. Another longtime watering hole casualty of rising rents: Brick, an outdoor venue that opened in 2013, shuttered in November.
Yet, commercial property owners say Wynwood rents are where they’re supposed to be.
“I think rents are predominantly in line with any other Miami walkable neighborhood,” said Alex Karakhanian, a landlord for a handful of Wynwood projects. Wynwood gets 6 to 9 million visitors a year, he said. “You’re getting a ton of people from all over the place coming to Wynwood … I go to Zak the Baker at least once a week, and I’ve never gotten a table without having to wait on a normal work day.”
Stern’s bakery is insulated by a legacy lease that’s below the $100 per-square-foot mark, which is the only reason his business can still operate in Wynwood’s current market conditions, he said. Over the past 10 years, pricing for neighboring storefronts shot up from the $20s a square foot to $100‑plus per square foot on prime blocks, Stern said.
“I’ve still got another seven, eight years left [on the lease],” Stern said. “But in order for an independent, local craftsman like myself to succeed, [landlords are] going to need to be much more reasonable than $100 a square foot. It’s just that the barrier to entry is too tall.”
The Wynwood retail market, including less desirable streets, is more expensive than the overall Miami retail market, data show. Between 2023 and 2025, the average asking rent for retail and restaurants is between the high $60s to low $80s per square foot compared to low-to-mid $50s per square foot citywide, according to CoStar.
Vacancies are rising.
In the third quarter, the vacancy rate in the Wynwood/Design District submarket hit 9.7 percent compared to 3.2 percent for Miami-Dade County overall, according to a Colliers report. During the same period last year, Miami-Dade’s vacancy rate was 2.8 percent compared to 6.5 percent for the Wynwood/Design District submarket.
Metro 1’s Andres Nava agreed that certain Wynwood corridors have blasted past $100 a square foot, but stressed “that’s not the entire neighborhood.” For instance, a fitness tenant typically tops out at about $70 to $80 per square foot, triple‑net, for a roughly 2,000‑square‑foot space. Food and beverage operators, depending on whether they can serve liquor, tend to land in the $60- to $70‑per‑square‑foot range, Nava said.
“Foot traffic is obviously mostly on Northwest Second Avenue and Northwest Third Avenue,” Nava said. “Those are the two main pedestrian corridors. When you start going to the residential projects that don’t attract as much foot traffic, you see rents that are more sustainable.”
Some developers recognize this reality, Nava said. For instance, he recently brokered leases for Hot Body Pilates and coffee bar Chrome Cafe at Amara Wynwood, a mixed-use project at 45 Northeast 27th Street developed by Chicago-based Fitfield Companies.
“The rents need to be a lot more palatable and attainable to create a sustainable future for Wynwood,” Nava said. “Some developers like Fitfield will be more lenient on reducing the rent to get the right operators in the neighborhood.”
When Wynwood’s early pioneers were buying warehouses to redevelop a decade ago, the neighborhood was drawing fewer than 50,000 visitors a year, Karakhanian said. In his view, the same way rents were $15 to $20 per square foot back when there was “no foot traffic,” the combination of millions of visitors and a limited supply of walkable streets now supports today’s rent growth.
Karakhanian noted that some Wynwood retailers, restaurateurs and bar owners are racking up north of $10 million in annual sales.
“Recently, one of our tenants bought the space they were leasing for $140 a square foot, triple net. They did the math on their expenses and decided to purchase the space for close to $2,800 a square foot,” he said.
Karakhanian’s Miami-based Lndmrk Development, Scott Sherman’s Miami-based Torose Equities and Michael Simkins’ Miami Beach-based Lion Development Group sold a retail condo at Society Wynwood for $3.7 million to the owners of I Scream Gelato. When the sale closed, he was approached by other tenants throughout Lndmrk’s Wynwood portfolio about possibly buying their spaces, Karakhanian said.
“It’s definitely not a one-off scenario,” he said. “If a tenant is approaching you to buy their space, it is very hard for me to believe that a tenant is doing poorly.”
Some leasing brokers say the foot traffic in Wynwood makes it a better value than other walkable commercial districts in Miami. The neighborhood has “10 times” the foot traffic than Brickell, Coconut Grove, the Design District, Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road and Giralda Avenue in Gables, Tony Arellano with Dwntwn Realty Advisors told TRD.
Average asking rents in Coconut Grove are 10 to 15 percent higher, 30 percent higher in Lincoln Road and five times more in the Design District compared to Wynwood, Arellano added.
“Whoever claims that Wynwood rents don’t match the foot traffic, let’s do the comparison,” Arellano said. “You’ll find Wynwood is still a very good value.”
The view from the ground
On the ground, however, even successful operators are hitting a wall. Gramps, one of Wynwood’s early and best‑known bars, is closing in January after more than a decade in the neighborhood. Pizza Tropical, an Italian pie joint within Gramps, shut down this week. Owner Adam Gersten told TRD “it’s not just the rent.” But his decision also reflects seven days a week of wear and tear, mounting repair bills and the cost of upgrading a space that has seen heavy use.
“Having to pay a little more [rent] is not the end of the world because, thankfully, people still go there,” Gersten said. “We got all these people moving into the neighborhood. But they’re Ubering to one place, staying there and then leaving. They’re not necessarily bar hopping.”
Gersten traces part of the pressure to landlords who acquired buildings at aggressive prices and now must start rent at $75 a square foot, then layer on passthrough expenses such as maintenance and property taxes.
“I used to think paying $40 square foot in rent was a good number because you can make money,” Gersten said. “With triple net, today you’re looking at paying in the $80s, $90s and $100s. When you have a sizable space that needs to make money, you are just churning tenants.”
For Stern, developers and brokers who insist Wynwood’s foot traffic is doing well are refusing to see reality.
“I think they’re dreaming,” he said. “If you’re comparing it to some of these peaks that we have, sure. But [to achieve] that every day, all day consistency, we’ve got to remain humble and honest about who we are.”
