Allied Partners' 38-Story Tower to Replace Miami Beach's Savoy Hotel

New York-based Allied Partners has filed plans to demolish most of Miami Beach’s historic Savoy Hotel at 425 Ocean Drive and put up a 38-story, roughly 480-foot tower in its place, using Florida’s Live Local Act to clear a site that local zoning alone would never allow, The Real Deal reported September 16. Arquitectonica designed the project, which pairs 150 residences, 60 of them workforce housing, with 76 hotel rooms, a beach club, retail space and pools.

Why it matters

Ocean Drive is a low-rise, historic strip, and the Live Local Act does not care. The statute lets a qualifying project bypass local height and zoning review in exchange for workforce units, and it moves through an administrative process the city cannot vote down. Miami Beach can object to losing another piece of Art Deco-era South Beach, but state law ties its hands, which is exactly the fight this statute was built to produce on a corridor that has resisted towers for decades. The South Florida market hub is tracking how the Live Local Act is reshaping Miami Beach’s oceanfront blocks project by project.

The numbers

The filing proposes a 38-story, roughly 480-foot tower with 150 total residences, including 60 workforce housing units, plus 76 hotel rooms carried over from the Savoy’s current operation. Amenities include a beach club, retail space and pools. The plan preserves a portion of the existing Savoy structure while clearing most of the historic site for new construction.

What’s next

Miami Beach has not set a public hearing date, and neither Allied Partners nor Arquitectonica has issued its own announcement beyond the filing. The city’s ability to intervene is limited to the historic-preservation and flood-standard questions the Live Local process leaves open, not the height or density Allied Partners is entitled to build. Expect the fight to center on how much of the original Savoy survives, not whether the tower rises at all.