Bal Harbour

Bal Harbour sits at the northern tip of the barrier island most people simply call Miami Beach. Baker's Haulover Inlet cuts across the village's northern edge, connecting the head of Biscayne Bay to the Atlantic, with Haulover Park on the far bank. The village is small — six-tenths of a square mile, 3,093 residents at the 2020 census — walkable and almost entirely residential, with Collins Avenue, signed as State Road A1A, carrying everything through it.

It was incorporated in August 1946 on 245 acres owned by a Detroit syndicate that included Carl G. Fisher, and the name is a coinage: the B of bay and the al of Atlantic. Its reputation rests on two things: the beach on one side and Bal Harbour Shops on the other, built by the Whitman family in 1965. Nearly every building here is within a short walk of both, which is why the address has held its value through decades of construction cycles. Surfside lies immediately south, Bay Harbor Islands across Indian Creek to the west, and Aventura a few minutes north over the inlet.

The housing stock is unusually layered for so small a place. Two-story garden co-ops from the late 1940s and 1950s sit alongside 1960s and 1970s mid-rises and a short row of branded oceanfront towers built since 2004. The range within a few blocks is wide: a post-war co-op of a couple of dozen apartments and a hotel-branded tower of several hundred residences share the same avenue.