Developer Pitches Workforce Housing, Office, Retail For South Beach Parking Lot
The owner of a South Beach hotel wants to build a mixed-use project on a city-owned parking lot next door.
WPH Properties LLC, which owns the Washington Park Hotel, has proposed a seven-story building with 135 parking spaces at 1000 Washington Ave., The Next Miami reports.
The project would have ground-floor commercial space, 33 units of workforce housing across three floors, and a top-floor hotel or office use, plus a rooftop amenity space, according to an agenda item for the Miami Beach Finance and Economic Resiliency Committee's Jan. 27 meeting.
WPH Properties is registered to Jean Simonian, the owner of luxury watch retailer Westime, which is based in Beverly Hills but has a Downtown Miami location at 701 South Miami Ave. The developer applied to develop the lot in April 2021, according to a Miami Beach staff report, and is seeking a 99-year ground lease with annual escalating rents.
The proposal would triple the available parking from the current 15K SF surface lot, with a mechanized parking apparatus connecting a 10K SF underground parking level to two levels of above-ground parking below the housing floors. Beilinson Gomez is the architect of the project.
WPH Properties agreed to fund a single-level parking structure elsewhere in the city and donate $150K to fund improvements to Flamingo Park if its offer is accepted.
The site would require a rezoning, after which it would be valued at $8.8M, according to a CBRE appraisal that WPH funded. The parking lot, P13, generated $231K of revenue in 2021 and $255K last year, according to the staff report.
WPH Properties invested $52M to purchase and renovate the Washington Park Hotel, according to a letter from the developer's representative, The Next Miami reports. The developer expects the construction of the mixed-use building to cost roughly $25M.
WPH Properties acquired the hotel in February 2021 from Ladder Capital for $43.8M, according to Miami-Dade property records. Ladder Capital had been a lender on the property and executed a deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure action against previous owner CRP/TWG Washington Avenue LLC, an entity registered to the headquarters of private equity giant The Carlyle Group.
