North Miami Beach

North Miami Beach — NMB to almost everyone who lives there — was first platted in 1881 as Fulford-by-the-Sea, taking its name from Captain William H. Fulford of the U.S. Coast Guard. It incorporated as the Town of Fulford in 1926 and became North Miami Beach in 1931. For one season in between it held Carl Fisher's Fulford-Miami Speedway, a wooden board track banked at fifty degrees, which ran a single 300-mile race before some 20,000 spectators on 22 February 1926 and was scattered across the neighborhood by the hurricane that September.

The 2020 census recorded 43,676 residents in 15,521 households, of which 9.4 percent were vacant — a far lower share than in the resort cities nearby — and two in five households are married couples. This is a year-round city rather than a seasonal one, and the housing reflects that: the buildings are practical, well-located and priced for people who use them every day. Its two landmarks are unexpected ones: the Ancient Spanish Monastery, a twelfth-century cloister from Segovia that William Randolph Hearst bought in the 1920s and that was reassembled here in the 1950s, and the thousand-acre Oleta River State Park on the bay.

The eastern edge of the city, around NE 166th and 167th Streets, is waterfront: quiet canal-side buildings with boat dockage, close enough to Sunny Isles that some of them are listed in its submarket. Further inland the buildings cluster along 163rd Street and the numbered avenues, with easy access to I-95 and State Road 826, Aventura Mall a few minutes north and the beach a short drive east. Most of the stock dates from the late 1960s and 1970s, three to twelve floors, with a small amount of newer construction on the water.