Developers Barbara and Sebastian Cobas have submitted plans for a 480-unit residential project called NoMi 7|90 in unincorporated Miami-Dade County. The proposed development, located at 9001 Northwest Seventh Avenue and 663 Northwest 90th Street near El Portal and west of Interstate 95, is the latest in a series of multifamily projects under Florida’s Live Local Act.
The application requests a pre-application meeting with county officials to receive feedback before submitting formal documents. The project would use increased height and density allowances provided by the Live Local Act and Miami-Dade County’s workforce housing program.
The Live Local Act permits developers to build up to the tallest allowable height within a mile and the highest density allowed by local zoning if they reserve at least 40 percent of units for households earning up to 120 percent of the area median income (AMI) for at least three decades. In this case, the Cobases plan to set aside 192 out of the total 480 apartments for such households. Although current zoning restricts buildings on the site to 12 stories, the state law allows them to construct up to 13 stories.
Miami-Dade’s workforce housing program offers an additional six stories in exchange for designating another portion of units as affordable. The developers intend to allocate an extra 60 apartments for households making no more than 140 percent of AMI. According to the Florida Housing Finance Corporation, Miami-Dade’s annual AMI stands at $87,200.
Property records indicate that Barbara and Sebastian Cobas acquired the nearly three-acre site through two transactions totaling $2.7 million in 2015 and 2021.
Across South Florida, developers are increasingly turning to the Live Local Act as a way to increase project size. For example, Coral Rock Development Group is building Dulce Vida Live Local, an eight-story complex with 227 units in Allapattah. Spanish developer Pablo Castro and Laura Tauber are planning The HueHub in West Little River, which will feature over four thousand apartments—the largest Live Local project announced so far in South Florida.
Despite many proposals under this state law, only about three thousand Live Local units have been completed across Florida so far. However, more than forty-two thousand apartments are currently planned or under development statewide.
