Location: Biscayne Bay side of Miami Beach, west of Alton Road
Principal streets: Purdy Avenue, Bay Road, West Avenue and 20th Street
Property mix: Waterfront condominiums, townhouses, marina facilities and commercial premises
Retail investment: Asana Partners acquired a seven building portfolio totaling approximately 61,400 square feet for a reported $68.75 million in 2018
Neighborhood overlay: Adopted November 18, 2020, with specific regulations for formula retail and restaurant businesses
Street improvements: Roads raised an average of two to three feet as part of drainage and infrastructure work, according to the city’s January 2020 account
Lucali occupies approximately 3,500 square feet on Bay Road. A short walk away, Eberjey’s Purdy Avenue store occupies about 700. Both renewed their leases in a group of transactions announced in 2023, alongside other shops, restaurants and fitness businesses. Those small premises help explain the attraction of Sunset Harbour. There are enough different reasons to come here that the neighborhood can fit into an ordinary day, whether or not dinner is involved.
The setting is the bay side of Miami Beach. The waterfront condominiums and marina give it a very different scale when seen from the water than from its commercial streets, where shorter buildings, individual shopfronts and traces of its industrial past remain. An apartment here offers proximity to that mixture. The beach requires a trip east; the immediate surroundings are organized around the bay, food, exercise, services and people who return to the same places.
That assortment of businesses has a property structure behind it. In 2018, Scott Robins and Philip Levine sold seven buildings to Asana Partners for a reported $68.75 million. The acquisition brought approximately 61,400 square feet of commercial space under the investment firm’s ownership. Several apparently separate neighborhood destinations therefore belonged to a single portfolio. For a resident, the distinction matters because leasing decisions across multiple addresses can influence the range of businesses within walking distance.
Miami Beach has also used zoning to preserve that range. The Sunset Harbour overlay adopted in 2020 distinguishes the neighborhood center from perimeter commercial corridors along Alton Road and part of Dade Boulevard. It regulates formula businesses, meaning establishments with multiple locations and standardized features. The ordinance specifically anticipates that an operator may need to offer a distinct presentation in affected areas. Describing Sunset Harbour as simply prohibiting chains misses those distinctions. Its local character has been made an explicit planning objective.
The streets themselves show another intervention. The city raised roads by an average of two to three feet and installed a pumped drainage system. Existing buildings did not automatically rise with them. Connecting the higher public roadway to lower private properties required adjustments at entrances, sidewalks and drainage points, sometimes extending onto private land. The changes help explain the differences in level visible along parts of the commercial district.
For someone buying here, those details deserve the same attention as the view. A higher floor does not tell you how the building’s garage entrance, electrical equipment or ground level spaces are protected. The association’s drainage arrangements, flood history, insurance and planned work need to be examined at the property. For a commercial tenant, the threshold between sidewalk and premises can affect access, water management and the cost of adapting the space.
Sunset Harbour suits someone who wants the surrounding streets to contribute to daily life. Its appeal rests partly on businesses outside the condominium’s control and infrastructure beyond its parcel boundary. Choosing an apartment here means evaluating that relationship closely, including the walk from the lobby, the neighboring uses and the route into the garage. Two residences with similar bay views can offer quite different versions of living in the same neighborhood.