Article Courtesy of The Miami
Herald
By JAMES H. BURNETT III
Published June 23, 2009
Joshua Hamann jokingly compares himself to the last
human in a city overrun by zombies. He's not suggesting his neighbors are
zombies. The problem is, he has no neighbors.
Hamann dwells in a newly opened condo. And in the
six weeks since moving into the gleaming new Everglades on the Bay in
downtown Miami, he has felt pretty lonely. Hamann occupies one of only
about 50 sold condos in his 49-story tower, out of 409 units.
A couple miles north at
Midtown Miami, Alisha Marks knows the same feeling. ''It
was pretty much a ghost town when I got here,'' she says.
It's an odd time for South Florida's
condo market. Over development compounded by the credit
crunch and a sluggish economy created an abundance of
condo units.
So, what is life like for the few
residents whose lights are on?
''Weird,''
says Hamann, a 28-year-old project manager for a window
shading company, who rents the $400,000 one-bedroom,
one-bath unit on the fifth floor. Everglades on the Bay
opened in April and offers residents great views, clean
white walls, spotless carpets, stainless steel appliances,
a well-equipped gym, a pool, and |
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Joshua
Hamann lives in the largely unoccupied Everglades on the Bay condo
in downtown Miami. Here he calls the elevator.
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even
party rooms. Hamann moved in immediately.
Since then, he has one neighbor on his floor. It took
two weeks before his first experience of sharing an elevator ride with a
neighbor. ''He didn't know how to react,'' Hamann notes.
''I'm a sociable guy, but you can't
socialize with what isn't there,'' says Hamann, who commutes on weekends to
the Gulf Coast where his wife lives. He jokes that before he moved in, he
saw brochures featuring smiling ''crowds'' hanging around the
pool.
On a recent Friday morning,
Hamann encountered exactly three people over the course of several hours --
two security guards, and a concierge.
Several stops in the fitness
center? Empty.
Several visits to the pool?
Empty.
Several visits to the laundry
room? Empty.
The building is emptier than the
cheap seats during a Marlins game at LandShark stadium.
''This is how it goes every
day,'' Hamann said, adding that he interacted with more neighbors growing up
in rural Kentucky, where farms were spaced a mile apart.
Why all the empty units with no
residents?
In Miami-Dade alone, more than
23,000 new condominium units have come onto the market since 2002, according
to Condo Vultures, a real estate firm that also researches trends in the
condo market. Most of the new units are concentrated in the Brickell,
downtown, and Midtown Miami communities. Thousands more have been built in
Broward. Even more are in the pipeline.
During the boom, most of those
units were considered ''sold.'' But since the market busted because of bad
loans, wildly optimistic bank lending practices and a tightening credit
market, many of the newer condo buildings sit largely empty as sold units
wait to close or have been returned to the developers.
An occupancy report,
commissioned by the Miami Downtown Development Authority and released last
week, indicated the glut may be slowly disappearing. Even so, roughly
one-third of the inventory, 8,300 units in the downtown and Midtown Miami
area are unsold. For projects completed since 2008, just 34 percent of the
units have closed, according to the report.
Some of the sold units may not
yet be occupied, and some of the unsold units may have been rented out. Take
a nighttime drive along Biscayne Boulevard or Brickell Avenue and one will
notice lots of dark windows in those sleek new high-rises.
Mimi Scott faced a similar situation at the Radius
tower in downtown Hollywood. The condo opened in November 2007, and she
moved in shortly after. It was ghastly quiet, she says.
''I didn't like it,'' says Scott, a retired playwright
who lives part of the year in South Florida.
"There still aren't a lot of people down the
hall. There are a couple of neighbors near me. But more empty than full
units, at least on my floor.''
But for Alisha Marks, a 28-year-old public relations
executive, things are slowly getting better in her building.
Marks has lived in a one-bedroom condo at Midtown
Miami for six months, and has only recently begun to see neighbors.
Marks thought of her once-empty floor in the 28-story
tower as a playground of sorts, ''but after a while you begin to miss that
interaction,'' she says.
She says the silence in a largely empty building is
"kind of creepy -- but more strange than creepy -- because of the
silence and the emptiness.''
"In the past month or so, I have gotten a few
neighbors. And now the adjustment is to having them around. They're fine,
but going from no one else to three people on my floor almost makes it seem
loud, too loud!''
But all is not lost in these empty buildings,
according to Jack McCabe, president of Deerfield Beach-based McCabe Research
& Consulting, LLC.
While McCabe believes the most recent condo boom
''happened five or six years too soon,'' he doesn't believe it has to take
that many years to get the empty and available units into the hands of
responsible owners.
''It could take up to five to six years, but many
people will tell you the condo market will trail close behind the
single-family home market,'' McCabe says. "And that market is still one
to two years away from serious signs of recovery.''
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