HueHub, Florida's largest Live Local project, tests the law's limits
Seven 34-story towers on 12 acres, cleared largely by state preemption of local zoning. This is the scale Live Local now enables.
HueHub, a 4,040-unit project of seven 34-story towers on 12 acres in West Little River, is now the largest development in Florida entitled through the Live Local Act. For developers, it is the clearest test yet of how much scale the state’s zoning-preemption law can actually deliver, and how much friction that scale creates on the ground.
Why it matters
Live Local lets qualifying workforce-housing projects bypass local height, density and zoning limits if a share of the units stays below market, so long as the affordability math is met. HueHub pushes that further than any project before it: the developer, Pablo Castro, says every apartment will be furnished and attainably priced, exceeding the law’s requirement that only 40 percent of units rent below market. That is the entitlement superpower reshaping South Florida in one project, a tower cluster on land that local zoning alone would never have allowed at this height. It also draws the predictable friction. The scale, the developer’s profile, and the reliance on state preemption over local review have all drawn scrutiny, the same tension we covered in the Related Group’s Hollywood Live Local suit and Manatee County’s impact-fee fight, where local governments resisted Tallahassee’s reach.
The numbers
At 4,040 units, HueHub is several times the size of a typical Live Local filing, and its seven-tower massing on a 12-acre unincorporated Miami-Dade site is unusual for the program. The 2026 amendments to the act expanded state control further and opened more categories of land, including some government and religious-owned parcels, to qualifying projects, widening the aperture developers can build through.
What’s next
Watch whether HueHub actually finances and breaks ground at its stated scale, or whether the political and practical friction trims it, the recurring gap between what Live Local entitles and what gets built. Either way, it sets the ceiling other South Florida developers will measure against. For the Miami market, the project is a live experiment in whether state preemption can outrun local resistance at this size.