Crescent Heights files 1,030-unit Live Local plan for Miami's Edgewater

Crescent Heights has filed plans for 1,030 apartments on a 2.6-acre assemblage at 3180 Biscayne Boulevard in Miami's Edgewater, a two-tower proposal whose near-term fate turns on a 50 percent parking reduction scheduled for the Urban Development Review Board. The eastern tower would rise 49 stories and hold 618 market-rate units, while the other would carry 412 apartments restricted to households earning no more than 120 percent of the area median income, a threshold Fannie Mae puts at $97,600 and a set-aside that lands at exactly the 40 percent Florida's Live Local Act requires in exchange for tax breaks and zoning incentives. The Real Deal reported the filing, crediting Florida Yimby.

The parking request is where the statute does its work. The project calls for 941 spaces, and Crescent Heights wants to halve that requirement through Miami 21 waivers and Live Local Act provisions. Filings cited in the coverage put the site's allowable capacity above 2,662 units, well beyond the 1,030 proposed, leaving the waiver stack, not the unit count, as the binding constraint in Edgewater.

In the same week, Crescent Heights submitted plans for a 43-story Live Local tower in Miami Beach with 163 units and 1,700 square feet of retail, a 557-foot building that would rank among the tallest structures in that city. A year earlier it proposed a 42-story, 360-unit multifamily building with an adjacent six-story commercial structure beside its 588-unit Forma Tower, completed in 2024. Led by Sonny Kahn, Russell Galbut and Bruce Menin, the firm already operates Nema-branded towers in Boston, San Francisco and Chicago, which makes the Edgewater filing read as much as a brand extension as a local bet.

The Edgewater filing slots into the build-over-buy trade this publication has argued is reshaping development: entitlements and debt are where developers now find scarcity, and in this case the resource being secured is zoning rather than equity. The income half of the market clears on different terms, as the August sale of Doral Marketplace, where a Dallas senior-living operator is taking on the $50 million mortgage, moved a stabilized asset on an assumed loan.

Two Live Local filings in a week point to the statute as the firm's Miami growth channel, with both deals resting on the same exchange of affordable set-asides for parking and height relief. Whether the 50 percent parking reduction survives at the Urban Development Review Board will test whether a 40 percent set-aside at 120 percent of area median income remains the going price for that density. Crescent Heights is underwriting a vote, and the board meets Sept. 16.