Where is Everyone??????

Article Courtesy of The Miami Herald
By JAMES H. BURNETT III
Published June 23, 2009



Joshua Hamann jokingly compares himself to the last human in a city overrun by zombies. He's not suggesting his neighbors are zombies. The problem is, he has no neighbors.

Hamann dwells in a newly opened condo. And in the six weeks since moving into the gleaming new Everglades on the Bay in downtown Miami, he has felt pretty lonely. Hamann occupies one of only about 50 sold condos in his 49-story tower, out of 409 units.
A couple miles north at Midtown Miami, Alisha Marks knows the same feeling. ''It was pretty much a ghost town when I got here,'' she says.

It's an odd time for South Florida's condo market. Over development compounded by the credit crunch and a sluggish economy created an abundance of condo units.

So, what is life like for the few residents whose lights are on?

''Weird,'' says Hamann, a 28-year-old project manager for a window shading company, who rents the $400,000 one-bedroom, one-bath unit on the fifth floor. Everglades on the Bay opened in April and offers residents great views, clean white walls, spotless carpets, stainless steel appliances, a well-equipped gym, a pool, and


Joshua Hamann lives in the largely unoccupied Everglades on the Bay condo in downtown Miami. Here he calls the elevator.

even party rooms. Hamann moved in immediately.

Since then, he has one neighbor on his floor. It took two weeks before his first experience of sharing an elevator ride with a neighbor. ''He didn't know how to react,'' Hamann notes.

''I'm a sociable guy, but you can't socialize with what isn't there,'' says Hamann, who commutes on weekends to the Gulf Coast where his wife lives. He jokes that before he moved in, he saw brochures featuring smiling ''crowds'' hanging around the pool.

On a recent Friday morning, Hamann encountered exactly three people over the course of several hours -- two security guards, and a concierge.

Several stops in the fitness center? Empty.

Several visits to the pool? Empty.

Several visits to the laundry room? Empty.

The building is emptier than the cheap seats during a Marlins game at LandShark stadium.

''This is how it goes every day,'' Hamann said, adding that he interacted with more neighbors growing up in rural Kentucky, where farms were spaced a mile apart.

Why all the empty units with no residents?

In Miami-Dade alone, more than 23,000 new condominium units have come onto the market since 2002, according to Condo Vultures, a real estate firm that also researches trends in the condo market. Most of the new units are concentrated in the Brickell, downtown, and Midtown Miami communities. Thousands more have been built in Broward. Even more are in the pipeline.

During the boom, most of those units were considered ''sold.'' But since the market busted because of bad loans, wildly optimistic bank lending practices and a tightening credit market, many of the newer condo buildings sit largely empty as sold units wait to close or have been returned to the developers.

An occupancy report, commissioned by the Miami Downtown Development Authority and released last week, indicated the glut may be slowly disappearing. Even so, roughly one-third of the inventory, 8,300 units in the downtown and Midtown Miami area are unsold. For projects completed since 2008, just 34 percent of the units have closed, according to the report.

Some of the sold units may not yet be occupied, and some of the unsold units may have been rented out. Take a nighttime drive along Biscayne Boulevard or Brickell Avenue and one will notice lots of dark windows in those sleek new high-rises.

Mimi Scott faced a similar situation at the Radius tower in downtown Hollywood. The condo opened in November 2007, and she moved in shortly after. It was ghastly quiet, she says.

''I didn't like it,'' says Scott, a retired playwright who lives part of the year in South Florida.

"There still aren't a lot of people down the hall. There are a couple of neighbors near me. But more empty than full units, at least on my floor.''

But for Alisha Marks, a 28-year-old public relations executive, things are slowly getting better in her building.

Marks has lived in a one-bedroom condo at Midtown Miami for six months, and has only recently begun to see neighbors.

Marks thought of her once-empty floor in the 28-story tower as a playground of sorts, ''but after a while you begin to miss that interaction,'' she says.

She says the silence in a largely empty building is "kind of creepy -- but more strange than creepy -- because of the silence and the emptiness.''

"In the past month or so, I have gotten a few neighbors. And now the adjustment is to having them around. They're fine, but going from no one else to three people on my floor almost makes it seem loud, too loud!''

But all is not lost in these empty buildings, according to Jack McCabe, president of Deerfield Beach-based McCabe Research & Consulting, LLC.

While McCabe believes the most recent condo boom ''happened five or six years too soon,'' he doesn't believe it has to take that many years to get the empty and available units into the hands of responsible owners.

''It could take up to five to six years, but many people will tell you the condo market will trail close behind the single-family home market,'' McCabe says. "And that market is still one to two years away from serious signs of recovery.''