Hialeah

No American city has a larger proportion of Cuban and Cuban American residents than Hialeah, where they make up 84 percent of the population. Ninety-four percent of residents were Hispanic at the 2020 census, the highest share of any incorporated city outside Puerto Rico, and nearly nine in ten households speak Spanish at home. With 223,109 residents in 2020 it is the second-largest city in Miami-Dade and the sixth-largest in Florida.

Founded by the aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss and the cattleman James Bright and incorporated in September 1925, the city is best known beyond its borders for Hialeah Park, the 1925 racetrack that is both a National Register landmark and an Audubon bird sanctuary for its flamingos. The residential market has little to do with the towers on the coast. Hialeah is a city of two- and three-story villa and townhouse communities laid out around courtyards and small lakes, most of them built between the early 1970s and the mid-2000s, with a handful of taller 1970s buildings on the western avenues. Communities routinely run to two or three hundred homes.

For buyers this is one of the most accessible condominium markets in Miami-Dade, and one where the community matters more than the building name. The northwestern edge of the city runs up against the lake and golf communities at the Country Club of Miami and the Moors; the older grid of numbered streets and avenues to the south holds the 1960s and 1970s stock, including the few taller buildings the city has.