Miami Beach

Miami Beach is a resort city spread across a chain of barrier islands, some of them natural and some dredged into being, with the Atlantic on one side and Biscayne Bay — which divides the Beach from Miami proper — on the other. It was incorporated on 26 March 1915. Nearly two-thirds of its 18.7 square miles is water, and the 2020 census counted 82,890 residents on the seven square miles of land.

The city divides into distinct stretches. South Beach, the southernmost 2.5 square miles below 23rd Street, carries the Art Deco Historic District — hundreds of buildings from 1923 to 1943, the world's largest collection of the style, listed on the National Register in 1979 — along with the Lincoln Road shopping spine and the South of Fifth blocks around South Pointe Drive. Mid-Beach holds the Fontainebleau and Faena stretch of Collins Avenue long known as Millionaire's Row, a narrow band of land with ocean on one side and bay on the other. North Beach runs on from there toward Surfside.

Building stock is correspondingly varied. Post-war oceanfront co-ops and condo-hotels sit beside the 1997 to 2008 tower generation and the boutique work that followed it — ten to fifty residences, four to nineteen floors, and a level of finish aimed at buyers who do not want six hundred neighbors. A single street number on Collins Avenue can therefore mean almost anything.

For most buyers the practical question is which stretch suits them. South Beach offers walkability and the widest price range; Mid-Beach offers space and the Millionaire's Row addresses; the blocks running north are quieter and closer in character to the smaller towns beyond the city line.