It's a wild west: Inside Miami's skyscraper boom

For more than two months, Cipriani Residences has held the title of Miami’s tallest building. The three-tower luxury design has risen in the Brickell neighborhood, its wraparound terraces and airy glass promising the feel of the Italian Riviera on Biscayne Bay, topping out at 950 feet this month.

But it won’t be the tallest for long. In the fall, the flashy Waldorf Astoria Hotel & Residences, designed like a stack of nine askew cubes, will soar past to its final height of 1,049 feet. It will be the city’s first supertall — a skyscraper above 984 feet. The nearby curvilinear 902-foot Okan Tower, which will be completed first, will also be able to claim a superlative as the tallest to open for use, until the Cipriani and Waldorf projects wrap up construction. In the coming years, more buildings aim to match the Waldorf’s height, including Dolce & Gabbana’s first foray into luxury homes and hotel rooms with a monumental matte black and ivory tower capped with gold.

Miami’s skyline is rapidly changing, with a downtown skyscraper boom that was set in motion a decade ago after the Federal Aviation Authority began approving projects set at a new maximum allowable height of 1,049 feet. But that’s not the only reason the city and its surrounding neighborhoods, long known as a lively metropolis of late nights and ocean views, have become a developer’s playground. Hospitality, automobile and fashion brands — and confusingly, even Frida Kahlo’s estate — are all vying to build luxurious branded condos and hotels in Miami’s low-tax, little-unionized and business-friendly environment.

Some other splashy projects include billionaire Ken Griffin’s new global headquarters for the financial firm Citadel Group and Delano Residences, which will offer the Southeast’s first cantilevered observation deck. Just north, in Sunny Isles Beach, Bentley Motors is building the tallest oceanfront building in the country, complete with an elevator just for your car. Penthouses are being sold for tens of millions of dollars, reportedly attracting buyers including soccer superstar Lionel Messi and self-help guru Tony Robbins. President Trump, too, put forth his possible contribution to the skyline this past March with a rendering of a presidential library-slash-hotel that appeared to be AI-generated.

“Miami has been incredibly kind to developers,” said Ryan Shear, a managing partner of PMG, the company behind Waldorf Miami and the Delano. “It’s a wild west down here, but I love it, I prefer it this way.”

“I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg here,” he added. “There’s a lot of people with ambition and money and capability that want to put up a lot of real estate.”

After the boom, the bust might be lurking. Last year, the investment bank UBS ranked Miami as the top city globally at risk of a bubble — when value is overinflated, typically leading to a sharp drop or burst to correct course. For now, however, the national and global demand for Miami luxury properties remains high, the UBS report noted, with prices still below New York and Los Angeles. But that, too, is changing fast. For the first time, Miami has become the second-most expensive metropolitan area in the US, outranked only by San Francisco.

The city’s income inequality has also widened, and for Jean-François Lejeune, a professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture, the new crop of luxury buildings has become a potent symbol of that growing disparity.

“There is quite a lot of space available in Miami, without concentrating all the investments in a series of super high buildings, which are literally taking over the skyline,” he said in a phone call. “They’re an expression of private wealth. Transforming the landscape into an expression of CEO power is not what I was hoping to see develop in the city.”

Wealth migration

In the aftermath of COVID-19, the ultrawealthy set their sights on Florida for its laissez-faire attitude. In addition to Griffin’s relocation of the Citadel headquarters from Chicago in 2022, billionaires Howard Schultz, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page have all reportedly put more roots down in the city — including Zuckerberg’s record-setting island bunker. Miami’s former mayor Francis Suarez courted cryptocurrency firms and took his pay in Bitcoin, and the city was dubbed “Wall Street South” for its fast-growing sector of hedge funds and private equity firms. In November, the state will vote on whether to reduce property taxes through an amendment that critics have warned could gut local budgets.

But the southward wealth migration had already been set in motion, with Florida quadrupling its millionaires between 2010 to 2022. New York’s number of millionaires doubled but overall its share compared to other states in the country plummeted, trailing behind Texas, Florida and California, according to the financial think tank Citizens Budget Commission.

Florida’s low taxes and virtually no unionized construction labor may be an attractive duo for luxury buyers and builders — but reports have raised alarm bells over low wages and dangerous working conditions, and basic heat safety has become political fodder.

The rivalry between New York and Florida — and California and Florida, too — has also become heated as the wealthy have publicly criticized blue states and announced their decisions to relocate. New York City’s election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor has only supercharged the state’s naysayers, including a public feud by Mamdani and Griffin over taxing the rich. Still, Miami developers rely on New York comparisons, promoting the city as the “sixth borough” and the Waldorf Miami as the “tallest residential building south of New York.”

They are often the same firms benefitting from the competition, as New York, too, climbs higher and skinnier in a crowded skyline. PMG, for example, where Shear is principal, is also behind Manhattan’s Steinway Tower on Billionaire’s Row. The company is poised to become the leading developer of US supertalls after the 985-foot Delano breaks ground.

Though the wave of luxury supertalls has critics in the north too, Lejeune says that New York is “big enough to absorb” the new projects within its existing skyline of varied architectural styles.

But with how quickly Miami is building, he’s wary of the number of “glass box” structures whose only aims are to climb high, and fast, he said, “it’s kind of Dubai-like.”

A new skyline

What makes Miami’s skyline distinct is still forming in real time. The city and nearby Miami Beach are both known for its airy and colorful Mediterranean Revival styles, Caribbean influence and tropical take on Art Deco, but skyscrapers do not have a long history within the city.

“What makes a Miami building different from a New York building? Let’s begin with the most fundamental thing: We like terraces here,” said Bernardo Fort Brescia, founding principal of Arquitectonica, the firm behind Cipriani Residences. “The building aesthetic is not a glass box, it’s a layering of balconies of terraces.”

The city’s skyscraper projects have increasingly functioned as vertical country clubs, Fort Brescia pointed out. Amenities combine flashy fitness, wellness, leisure and community spaces. Vertiginous penthouses can offer their own outdoor perks.

“These penthouses can have backyards — they can have a swimming pool, they can have a garden. Why would I need that in New York? I’d be freezing.”

Fort Brescia began his architecture career in Miami in the mid-1970s as the city positioned itself as a connector to Latin America and lured financial firms to its sunny shores. He has been behind a number of its important architectural projects since, such as Brickell City Centre, which mixes housing, office space, dining and retail. One of Miami’s major advantages has been this integrated spirit, he said, reflected in its mixed-use zoning laws rather than having a business district that clears out after hours.

“Generally those districts were where you could hear a pin drop at night or the weekend because it was all office buildings,” he said. The city’s mayor at the time, Maurice Ferré, had a different vision. “His thinking was we need to create a complete city, like all European cities, where people lived, worked, everything in one place.”

“The streets are lively and filled with people till late — now, the Latin culture helps. Dinner is pretty late,” he added, laughing. “But having said that, it is the mix that really makes (Brickell) quite different than other neighborhoods in America.”

As many US cities have struggled with empty office buildings post-pandemic, Miami has bucked the trend with the low vacancies and strong sales, the Miami Herald reported earlier this year.

“This is like the model of what cities should be, except that we started 40 years ago,” Fort Brescia said. “It’s very difficult to do it overnight.”

Sinking land and rising tides

Despite the enthusiasm for building Miami higher, the question remains whether the city can quite literally support it. A University of Miami study in 2024 found that dozens of oceanfront buildings, including major branded luxury condos and hotels, are sinking by as much as three inches between Miami Beach and Golden Beach further north. Research began following the tragic partial collapse of the Champlain Towers in Surfside, which saw its somber 5-year anniversary in late June, though federal investigators recently attributed the collapse to structural design issues and alterations.

Land subsidence isn’t the only threat. With sea levels rising, the combination could mean more devastating floods along the coastal stretch that’s at the center of luxury development. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and spin up faster, too, having a more damaging effect. Though South Florida abides by strict statewide building codes to protect against wind and flooding, Lejeune is concerned that no new construction has been tested by destructive storms. The last major hurricane to hit Miami-Dade County was the catastrophic Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but the city did not take a direct hit.

“Hopefully we trust the engineers, but we do not have real tests — not even of the buildings that have less floors — with a real hurricane since their construction,” he said.

Day to day, as the city grows, there’s also the question of traffic, which snarls the city as public transit initiatives have repeatedly struggled. A $866 million bridge project aiming to provide some relief is years behind schedule, further exacerbating the congestion. Whether the city can support its growth is “a very good question that has been repeated for almost 30 years now,” Lejeune said, though he doubts that the super-rich buyers purchasing 80th-floor penthouses will be commuting on the highway. Though they might in the future travel by sky, instead, as Governor DeSantis has invested in vertiports for flying taxis, and future properties such as Anantara Miami and the The Residences at Shell Bay plan to build helipads, like the existing one at the skyscraper One Thousand Museum.

If Miami’s newest wealthy residents live in their properties or not, Lejeune just hopes they will have to pay higher taxes on them.

“We want to attract these types of people, and we’re not even going to make money out of them?” he said. “That’s really strange to me.”

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com