Case Study For 5 Acre / $5,000,000 Miami Lot

The real estate growth pattern for Florida tends to move in the direction away from its coasts. Much of the population lives in the thin strips following the coastlines - with much of the interior relatively empty. The gravamen of this is that quite large and relatively rectangular undeveloped parcels can be found quite near existing developments. One such parcel, a five acre vacant lot in Miami, is listed for sale on Zillow for around $5,000,000.00. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/6501-SW-125th-Ave-Miami-FL-33183/156270469_zpid/

Precast concrete is emerging as the most suitable system of building in Florida, being much better matched to Florida's unpredictable and dangerous weather than the site built lumber home. A relative newcomer to the Florida suburban development scene is ONX, which has already built several hundred precast concrete homes just south of Miami. I discuss one incarnation of these homes - what I term the American Foursquare - in a previous post: https://robertcarpentera.wixsite.com/mysite-1/single-post/analysis-of-onx-precast-florida-homes It has since come to my attention that ONX also builds townhomes, which, because of its precast concrete roof, is amenable to setting up a pleasant spacious rooftop terrace. You can see these homes, part of ONX On Grandville development, on their website: https://www.onxhomes.com/community/grandville/

What I would like to propose is a hybrid house, one which is part townhouse but with its own private courtyard garden, which also incorporates the rooftop terrace. This hybrid house has much in common with the Moroccan Riad, which served as its inspiration. The houses sit on lots just 40' wide by 90' long yet offer spacious private garden courtyards with pool, spa, and lush vegetation - along with open plan living and dining connected to the courtyard by way of tall glass window walls. What amounts to an outdoor house is set up on the rooftop terrace, with five bedrooms and four baths just below. A 3,600 sq ft lot works out to a density of some 12 homes per acre exclusive of streets. The inclusion of streets for the case study shown below works out to around 8 units per acre - in fact 42 units on 4.87 acres - working out to a lot cost of around $ 116,000.00.

With Miami land selling at quite a premium and with the ever present threat of destructive weather, the high density precast courtyard duplex seems a good strategy. The first set of drawings show what it would look like to construct such duplexes on the lot mentioned above. I hasten to point out that no attempt was made to determine what the zoning requirements might be or what sort of densities might to be permitted. A best case scenario was naively assumed. Note as well this lot was chosen simply because it happened to be listed on Zillow and serves to illustrate that the precast duplex is adaptable to the geometries presented by real world lots. The map underlays are from Google Maps.