Aventura moves to allow 30-story Biscayne Blvd towers on 130 acres

Aventura’s City Commission on Thursday takes up a package that would let developers build to 30 stories and 100 dwelling units per acre across roughly 130 acres of the city’s Biscayne Boulevard core. The overlay is city-initiated with no private applicant, and only the rulebook itself is up for final adoption.

Why it matters

Anyone holding or hunting land between Aventura Mall and the Brightline station is underwriting a different site by September. The Core subdistrict is built around the regional mall, with the FEC railway and the transit station on its western edge; the Edge subdistrict is a strip of small neighborhood-business and medical-office lots west of Biscayne. That Edge parcel list is where the packet gets interesting. Five of its 42 folios, contiguous lots 7 through 16 in Block 2 of Hallandale Park No. 9, are held by BH Aventura Land Holdings LLC, which uses 2999 Northeast 191st Street as its mailing address. That is the address of Aventura City Center, the project BH Group and Apollo Companies took full control of earlier this month. Institutional capital was assembling in this South Florida submarket while the city was drafting the upzoning.

The numbers

Standards are tiered, not uniform. All three subdistricts share a base of 0.5 minimum to 1.5 maximum FAR and 62 units per acre. Conditional use lifts the Core (85 acres, 11 parcels) to 4.0 FAR, 100 units per acre and 25 stories, or 30 with Gold or Platinum certification under the city’s green-building program. The Center (35 acres, 10 parcels) reaches 3.5 FAR, 95 units and the same heights. The Edge (10 acres, 42 parcels) reaches 3.0 FAR, 90 units and 20 stories, 25 with the bonus. Conditional use is triggered by any project over 50,000 sq ft, any parcel under 35,000 sq ft, or any FAR above 1.5. Residential parking drops to 0.5 spaces per unit. Bonus density requires two of eight public-benefit criteria worth at least 1% of hard costs.

What’s next

Two provisions decide the math. Base FAR and base density transfer within each subdistrict by recorded covenant, tracked in a city ledger, but the conditional-use bonus does not transfer, and a parcel that sends rights permanently forfeits its own conditional-use eligibility. Sellers of density get one shot. Item 5.A, the overlay text, is on second reading Thursday. The three map amendments are on first reading only, with second reading set for September 8. A similar version cleared first reading in February and never reached adoption while the city rewrote the transfer rules.