Renovation Contractor in Miami Beach, FL

Miami Beach, Florida

Miami Beach has some of the most varied housing in South Florida: Art Deco and MiMo apartment buildings, oceanfront condo towers, and single-family houses from the 1920s and 1930s on streets like North Bay Road, Prairie Avenue and Hibiscus Drive. What you can do to any of them depends heavily on where the property sits on the city’s preservation and flood maps.

We have renovated condo apartments in Miami Beach buildings, and our house work elsewhere, such as the Hollywood Lake House, a 1960s waterfront home taken back to structure, is the kind of project many Miami Beach owners are weighing.

The short version: find out which board has jurisdiction over your property, and how close your plans are to the 50% flood threshold, before you pay for design.

Historic districts and the Historic Preservation Board

Miami Beach has a long list of locally designated historic districts. The city’s designation reports include Espanola Way, Ocean Drive/Collins Avenue, Flamingo Park, Museum, Altos del Mar, Ocean Beach, Harding Townsite/South Altos del Mar, Palm View, Collins Waterfront, North Beach Resort, Flamingo Waterway, Morris Lapidus/Mid-20th Century, North Shore and Normandy Isles. Individual sites are designated as well, such as Old City Hall and the Venetian Causeway.

Properties in those districts, and designated sites, fall under the Historic Preservation Board rather than the Design Review Board. If you own a house in Palm View or Flamingo Park, or an apartment in a Deco building on the Ocean Drive/Collins corridor, plan for the possibility that exterior changes such as windows, doors, additions or façade work will need HPB review, and confirm the scope with Planning staff. We would check the designation before drawing anything.

Older buildings also bring older systems. In a condo renovation inside a Deco or MiMo building, we plan for shared risers, uneven slabs and association rules, which our article on Miami condo rules walks through.

Outside the districts: the Design Review Board

Properties outside designated historic districts and sites go to the Design Review Board when design review is required. The DRB also grants variances in hardship cases, hears appeals of the planning director’s decisions, and serves as the city’s floodplain management board for properties within its jurisdiction.

Many of the city’s older single-family houses sit outside the historic districts. The DRB has heard demolition requests for pre-1942 single-family homes on streets such as North Bay Road, Prairie Avenue and Hibiscus Drive. If you own an older house, a renovation that keeps the original structure may face a different review path than a teardown, and it is worth discussing with the Planning Department before choosing one. Our guide to renovating an older Florida home covers the structural side.

Why the 50% rule is stricter here than owners expect

The City of Miami Beach reports that 93% of buildings in the city are in a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area. If a house is improved or repaired by 50% or more of its building market value, the lowest floor has to be raised to current elevation requirements and every part of the structure must comply.

Miami Beach tracks this cumulatively. The city adds up the job values of all City of Miami Beach building permits issued over the past year and divides by the property value from the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser or a certified depreciated-replacement-cost appraisal. Splitting a big renovation into smaller permits a few months apart does not reset the count.

If you are buying, look up the property’s permit history on the city’s Civic Access portal before you close. The city describes its formula as counting the building permits issued in the past year, and it does not say that permits pulled by a previous owner are left out. A seller’s recent renovation could leave you with less room under the threshold than you assumed.

For a luxury renovation of an older house, this is often the deciding number. We would establish the market value and the likely job value early, then decide with you whether to stay under the threshold, elevate, or build new. Our article on the FEMA 50% rule goes deeper.