In a year like no other, the South Florida economy experienced unprecedented upheaval. In Miami-Dade, more than 451,000 workers — about two out of every seven members of the county’s pre-pandemic workforce — applied for unemployment; in Broward, more than 311,000.
Many of them worked in the tourism and hospitality sectors — and not a single hotel, and only a few restaurants, were spared from layoffs. Ditto Miami’s three main cruise companies, whose sailings remain canceled until at least March.
Yet for all of the carnage it wrought, the coronavirus pandemic saw numerous companies, tech professionals — and Kushner family members — announce they would be moving to Miami.
So while COVID-19 was always going to leave an indelible impact on Greater Miami business, it may also end up plotting the way forward and revealing its next chapter.
Below are the biggest local business stories from the year.
COVID shuts down cruise industry
Perhaps no other sector of the hospitality industry has been as affected by the COVID-19 pandemic as vacation cruising. On March 13, amid COVID-19 outbreaks on several cruise ships, the world’s largest companies — all based in Miami — announced they were canceling cruises for 30 days. The next day, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put in place a no-sail order, which the agency did not lift until October. Cruises remain canceled until at least March 2021 as companies work to meet CDC requirements to be able to welcome passengers again.
The sudden paralyzation left ships stranded with nowhere to dock as countries shut their borders. Many made their way to Florida, some with passengers whose lives had already been claimed by COVID-19. The following weeks were full of medical evacuations to South Florida hospitals as crew members also became ill; several died.
At year’s end, thousands of South Florida residents — longshoremen, shuttle drivers, travel agents — remain out of work.
— TAYLOR DOLVEN
Blackstone and techies move to Miami
For decades, Greater Miami leaders have worked to attract high-skill, high-wage jobs to the region. This strange year finally may have spurred momentum.
To date, the biggest player to land in Miami is Blackstone, which announced in October it would build a tech office here designed to employ more than 200. It joined a constellation of other financial groups making Miami moves; notably, finance was one of the only sectors to have seen net job growth in 2020 in Miami-Dade.
Then came the techies. For much of December, Silicon Valley exiles — certain ones at least — couldn’t stop talking about the Miami mystique. Thanks to a deluge of Tweets from prominent venture capitalists, the idea began gaining currency among a certain subset looking to flee the Bay Area.
This cohort seized on Miami Mayor Francis Suarez as the city’s cheerleader-in-chief bent on supercharging the city’s innovation ecosystem.
Longtime Miami entrepreneurship leaders want to make sure their values — especially inclusivity — aren’t eroded in the process.
— ROB WILE
Median home price hits new high
At the start of the year, the South Florida real estate market was chugging as usual, with median sales prices for single-family homes in Miami-Dade at $380,000, condos at $245,000.
Then came COVID.
After an upside-down April amid government-mandated shutdowns, the real estate market regained its footing, due in part to people fleeing densely populated areas and relocating to Miami to work remotely.
By the end of the year, the surprising impact of COVID on housing in Miami-Dade jolted the market to all-time highs.
Driven by historically low interest rates, home buying in Miami-Dade became a gladiator sport. Properties listed in the $400,000 range often sold sight-unseen just hours after being listed. Median sales prices shattered records, hitting an all-time high of $450,000 in November as existing inventory plummeted by nearly 40%.
The glutted condo market benefited too, driven in part by single-family home shoppers priced out of that market. Condo median sales prices hit $270,000 in November, up from $245,000 the previous year.
Broward County showed similar results, with a year-over-year increase of 13.3% in November and a median sales price of $425,000. Condos sold at a median price of $204,000, an increase of 20% year over year.
Expect the condo sales market to continue to heat up and prices to creep up in 2021, due to the lack of new construction of single-family homes in South Florida, especially Miami-Dade.
— RENE RODRIGUEZ
Art Basel canceled for 2020
The Miami version of the global Art Basel art fair that serves as the backbone of the city’s annual December Art Week was one of the many events canceled due to COVID-19.
The loss of Art Basel and parallel fairs like Art Miami and UNTITLED meant an estimated $16 million in economic impact fell by the wayside. Hotels, restaurants, waiters, ride-share drivers and even Realtors — who use the fairs to court wealthy home buyers — took a hit.
But for many in the local art scene, there was a silver lining, as museums, artists and gallerists insisted that the show go on, albeit differently. Homegrown fairs like Design Miami/ put on a pandemic-friendly in-person show, while a slew of other satellite events took things online with virtual programming.
— YADIRA LOPEZ
Work goes remote
The pandemic likely will not mean the end of the office, as some have argued. But few people have rushed back to their cubicles since government-imposed coronavirus lockdowns were lifted in May.
Having discovered the savings and efficacy of having employees work remotely during the pandemic, executives and workers at a broad range of firms — law, accounting, architecture firms, public relations, marketing and financial agencies among them — said they were content to keep doing so in the near future, and quite possibly beyond.
According to real estate firm CBRE Group, commercial vacancies spiked across the region in Q3, from 13.5% to 15.2% year-on-year. The Central Business District, Coral Gables, and the Airport-Doral area saw the largest increase in office vacancies, CBRE said.
Once vaccines become widely available and people do return, the office may look like a different place, with reconfigured floor plans to provide greater distancing and separation – lessons from COVID-19 applicable to a new epidemic that experts say is all but inevitable.
Virtually every office employer has also taken a hard look at whether all that expensive floor-space is really necessary.
Many office workers say they would love to keep working from home, and some experts say employers may well accommodate them, most probably through a flexible approach that combines working from home and in-office time.
— ANDRES VIGLUCCI
Shopping goes even more online
While the death of retail prior to coronavirus may have been exaggerated, 2020’s lockdowns accelerated that morbid narrative.
The case of Books and Books sums it up best. The venerable bookshop did 10 times the amount of online orders this year compared with 2019. But it still closed its 30-year-old Lincoln Road location in June due to the loss of foot traffic amid COVID and, ultimately, lingering rent pressures (though these have temporarily softened amid the pandemic).
Data from CBRE and commercial real estate data provider CoStar show the Miami market saw 0% growth rate in rents for its retail real estate this year. And the outlook remains grim.
“Temporary closures have turned permanent for many [Miami] retailers, pulling net absorption negative in recent quarters,” CBRE and CoStar said in a Dec. 21 note to clients. “This has pushed up vacancies in each of the past three quarters and the rate is now at a nine-year high.”
Traditional window-browsing instead was replaced by web surfing. That in turn has boosted companies like Dania Beach-based online pet store Chewy, which saw its price more than triple since the start of the year and hired 2,500 new employees in South Florida in 2020.
According to Jonathan Kingsley, executive managing director of office development for Colliers International, it is these kinds of companies, “the Amazons of the world and last-mile distributors that focus on delivering from an Amazon [warehouse] to someone’s door,” that are now propping up the region’s industrial real estate market.
— REBECCA SAN JUAN AND ROB WILE
The digital divide widens
As many as one in six households in Miami-Dade and Broward counties lack access to the Internet, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. There couldn’t have been a worse year for these residents, as the pandemic made people increasingly reliant on technology.
Accessing school, unemployment applications, and even basic health and safety information related to COVID-19 was a challenge for residents across South Florida.
Those affected were the city’s most economically vulnerable. That included agricultural workers in the county’s poorest city, Homestead, who often have no home internet. Older workers with limited English and technology skills were also impacted by a digital divide.
— YADIRA LOPEZ
Hospitality industry devastated
Miami-Dade hotels were forced to shut their doors on March 23 as part of the county-wide effort to curb COVID-19 infections. Overnight, thousands of housekeepers, bellmen, valet drivers, servers, cooks, were out of work.
Six months after the shut down — and even after hotels were allowed to reopen in June — around 40,000 people in Miami-Dade who worked in hospitality before the pandemic were still without a job, according to an estimate from Florida International University.
Average county hotel occupancy rates have rebounded to above 40%, nearly double the lowest point in the summer, and several hotels reported selling out for the Thanksgiving holiday week. Still, industry analysts warn the sector may not fully recover until 2023.
— TAYLOR DOLVEN
Brightline announces expansions (even though it isn’t running right now)
Even as it shuttered regular service indefinitely in May, Brightline continued to move forward on its vision of becoming South Florida’s — and the state’s — premier rail option. By the time 2020 wrapped up, Brightline had hammered out additional details for starting commuter in Miami-Dade’s northeast corridor, while also entertaining overtures from Broward to build a commuter line there, too.
It also entered into a long‐term agreement to develop, construct and operate a station at Disney Springs as it continued construction of its Orlando route even amid the pandemic. Brightline continues to be a major selling point for South Florida real estate professionals, including Stiles Corp., whose new Main at Las Olas Class A mixed-use development touts access to the express service as a critical amenity.
— ROB WILE
Racial disparity continues in Miami
As the country turned its attention to persisting racial disparities in the weeks of upheaval surrounding the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an examination of Miami-Dade’s Black population found these residents remain broadly disadvantaged — both separate and unequal.
While a Black middle class has established a firm foothold in 17-year-old Miami Gardens, Florida’s largest Black-majority city, most historically Black communities and neighborhoods across the county are today places of concentrated poverty and unemployment, an analysis by Florida International University shows.
Stark disparities endure — and in some cases are now widening — between Blacks and Miami-Dade’s white and Hispanic majority in measures of income, poverty, schooling, home-ownership and employment.
Those gaps, say historians, scientists, activists and longtime residents, are a consequence of longstanding, race-based disadvantages, policies and practices that effectively curtail business and employment opportunities and limit homeownership — the keys to building assets and attaining prosperity — for Black Miamians.
For instance, the median income for Black households in Miami-Dade in 2018 was $38,015, compared with $56,527 for households identifying as white, including white Hispanics. Nearly a quarter of Miami’s Black population is impoverished, compared with the county-wide rate of 16%.
And while more than 50% of white, non-Hispanic residents have at least a Bachelor’s degree, only about 18% of Black residents do. The rate for Miami-Dade is about one in three.
— ANDRES VIGLUCCI
