State Law Lets 13th Floor Demolish Two Miami Beach Hotels

Florida’s Resiliency and Safe Structures Act, not Miami Beach’s Historic Preservation Board, decided the fate of the Coral Reef and Patrician hotels. The 2024 law strips local boards of power to block demolition of qualifying coastal structures, and this spring 13th Floor Investments and Midtown Equities used it to begin tearing down both hotels at 3611-3621 Collins Avenue for a 19-story Casa Cipriani condo-hotel, the first project in Miami Beach’s Collins Waterfront Historic District to clear demolition this way.

Why it matters

Fla. Stat. 553.8991 bars a local government from prohibiting demolition of a structure seaward of the coastal construction control line that is either nonconforming to National Flood Insurance Program base flood elevation rules or ruled unsafe by a building official, and voids any contrary local ordinance. The exemptions are narrow: structures individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places, single-family homes, contributing structures added to a National Register district before January 1, 2000, and barrier-island towns under 10,000 people. Neither the Coral Reef (1941) nor the Patrician (late 1930s) carries an individual National Register listing, so Miami Beach’s local landmark status alone could not save them. Preservationists have named the Eden Roc, Cadillac and Casablanca as other Collins Avenue hotels the same test could reach, but none has a demolition application pending, and each would still need its own finding of FEMA nonconformity or an unsafe-structure order before the exemption gap applies to it. The precedent is the mechanism, not an automatic loss for the rest of the district.

The numbers

BH3 Management provided $105 million in financing in April, refinancing roughly $49.5 million still outstanding on a 2023 Bank OZK loan and adding $55.5 million in new proceeds. The approved replacement runs 19 stories and 342,465 square feet on the 1.1-acre site, with 23 condominium units and 36 hotel rooms under the Cipriani brand. 13th Floor and Midtown Equities bought the site for $73 million in 2023.

What’s next

Demolition is underway on site, and the developers have said condo sales are set to launch later this year, ahead of a groundbreaking. For every other owner of a pre-1994 hotel or apartment building along Miami beach’s coastal control line, the live question is no longer whether a historic designation protects the building. It is whether the structure can be flagged as flood-nonconforming or unsafe, because that finding, not the local preservation board, now decides what gets rebuilt.