Opal Realty, Scharf Group Win 11-Story Live Local Tower in Miami Beach
BH Collins LLC cleared the city's zoning counter without a hearing, the clearest test yet of the Live Local Act inside a Miami Beach historic district.
Miami Beach administratively approved an 11-story, 122-foot mixed-use tower at 7410 Collins Avenue on September 2, replacing a 1950s CVS in North Beach with 50 rental units under the Live Local Act. The developers are Abraham Bergman and Charles Hoffman of Opal Realty in New York, partnered with The Scharf Group, filing through the entity BH Collins LLC. Urban Robot designed the project, which cleared the city’s zoning counter without a commission vote or public hearing.
Why it matters
The site sits inside both the North Shore National Register Historic District and the Harding Townsite Local Historic District, the kind of overlapping historic protection that has stalled or downsized projects across Miami Beach for years. The Live Local Act let this one skip that fight entirely: the state law preempts local zoning and height review for qualifying workforce housing, and Miami Beach’s planning staff processed the approval administratively. For a developer sitting on another North Beach parcel inside these same districts, this is the first concrete proof that the override actually works here, not just on paper. Our own July count of Miami-Dade County’s Live Local pipeline, 27 applications and a 356-day median review, explicitly noted that Miami Beach runs its own separate queue outside that county list. This is the first case to show what that separate city pathway actually produces.
The numbers
The tower replaces the 1950s CVS building with 50 rental units: 30 market rate and 20 workforce, sized 664 to 900 square feet with private balconies. At least 40 percent of the units are covenant-restricted as affordable for a minimum of 30 years, per the recorded documents. The project keeps 8,535 square feet of ground-floor retail and a 2,397-square-foot lobby, with 25 parking spaces on a second-floor deck that includes tandem spots requiring valet service. Amenities include an 11th-floor rooftop pool and 876 square feet of amenity space. The approval requires the developers to pull a full building permit within 18 months.
What’s next
Watch the 18-month permit clock, since Live Local’s administrative approval is not itself a construction start. The bigger signal for South Florida developers is whether other North Beach owners inside the same historic districts now file similar Live Local applications rather than pursuing a variance or a historic preservation board hearing. If BH Collins pulls its permit on schedule, expect this site to become the reference case cited in the next North Beach entitlement fight.