Dropping a Glass Guillotine on Ocean Drive for Fake "Affordable" Housing

Proposed structure on Ocean Drive, Miami Beach

New York-based Allied Partners intends to demolish most of the historic site at 425 Ocean Drive.

Pure egalitarian harmony:

• 60 workforce housing units tucked safely on the bottom floors facing traffic (because sharing an elevator might feel a little too awkward for the folks upstairs).

• 90 sprawling luxury penthouses hovering in the clouds, averaging 2,000 square feet apiece. Which will sit empty most of the year.

• An 11,000-square-foot VIP commercial beach club so billionaires never have to touch public sand or that horrible natural ocean water.

• Separate rooftop pools, ensuring penthouse owners never endure the trauma of making accidental eye contact with the working class.

MIAMI BEACH — Cancel the leisurely walks and architectural history tours, folks. Florida's visionary lawmakers, led by former federal inmate Vicki Lopez, has solved the housing crisis. The cure is simple: flattening 1930s architecture gems and replacing them with a 38-story glass nastiness.

In a tear-jerking act of charity, Allied Partners has submitted plans for The Savoy at 425 Ocean Drive. The current Savoy Hotel and Arlington buildings—mere survivors of the Great Depression, World War II, and eighty years of hurricanes—have long committed the unforgivable crime of being only a few of stories tall (human-scale).

Fortunately, the Live Local Act is here to correct this tragic aesthetic blunder. Hiding behind the self-righteous banner of the Live Local Act, developers weaponize buzzwords like "affordable housing," "sustainability," and "flood mitigation" to sugarcoat naked profiteering as community goodwill. By selflessly bypassing pesky local pests like "city planners," "preservation boards," and "residents who bought homes with natural light." Why subject a visionary project to a tedious public hearing where annoying neighbors babble about "pedestrian friendly neighborhood character" when an underpaid bureaucrat can just rubber-stamp a 480-foot tower from behind a desk?

And what a triumph of egalitarian planning it is. To qualify as a holy crusade for "workforce housing," the tower generously offers 60 whole workforce units on the street-facing lower levels. Above them, in a completely disjointed tower, sit 90 palatial, 2,000-square-foot luxury penthouses, 76 boutique hotel suites, and an exclusive, 11,000-square-foot commercial beach club for people whose primary residence is a yacht. The message to the local working class is inspiring: "We built this for you, so long as you take the service elevator and don't breathe too loudly near the rooftop VIP infinity pool."

Heritage enthusiasts need not worry about losing the historic Savoy, either. The developers have promised to leave a tiny scrap of the original 1937 facade glued to the lobby—much like a hunter mounting the stuffed head of an endangered stag above their fireplace.

As for the 1941 Neo-classical Arlington building next to Savoy? Thanks to the state’s poetic Resiliency and Safe Structures Act, the developer can declare the historic property a "flood risk" and smash it. Nothing screams coastal resiliency quite like hammering millions of pounds of steel and concrete directly into a sea-level barrier island with literal zero setbacks.

It turns out the soul of Miami Beach wasn't its iconic Deco features, its soft neon glow, or its world-renowned architectural legacy after all. It was the burning need for another mirrored glass rectangle where hedge fund managers can park their capital in the sky while blue-collar workers sleep directly beneath them, as long as they don't have to cross paths. Tallahassee has no business dictating local affairs. Miami Beach shares virtually nothing with the rest of this state—not its architecture, design, culture, demographics, or mindset. Florida attitudes feel just as alien here in Miami Beach as deep Alabama or rural Georgia would. Keep your Panhandle hillbilly hands off our island. Tallahassee is an ugly, disenchanting, beige government outpost masquerading as a capital—it has no business telling an Art Deco district how to look. We the residents need to mobilize against this evil before our lifestyle-defining pedestrian-friendly streetscape is sold off to the highest bidder - greed and indifference.