Inside the Mind of Stephen Bittel

THOUGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF DOWNTOWN BY MIRACLE MILE’S LEADING LANDLORD

Fifteen years ago Stephen Bittel – Chairman and founder of South Florida commercial real estate powerhouse Terranova – decided to begin buying property on Miracle Mile. Today, Terranova is the largest property owner on what Bittell calls Coral Gables’ “high street,” and a firm believer that families today want to live in walkable urban environments rather than in the suburbs. We recently caught up with Bittel and asked him for his insights about Coral Gables, where in recent years he has played a growing role as a civic booster.

WHY DID YOU START TO INVEST IN CORAL GABLES?

It’s almost 15 years now since we bought out first buildings in an eight-property portfolio on Miracle Mile. We had at that time one of the largest suburban supermarket-anchored portfolios in the state, but as the communities got built out, the customer base stopped growing… So, this was the first re-diversification of our portfolio, focused on the high street.

When we did it on Miracle Mile no one really paid much attention. But we believed it was the right play because these urban cores were where more and more people wanted to live and work. For the generation that I grew up as part of, every time you changed something in your life and you needed a little more space at home, you moved further out of town and more desperately into the suburbs. And that was changing. It became apparent to me through our younger employees, who weren’t going an hour away to Kendall but were taking a smaller, older house in Coral Gables and renovating it.

WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW IN THE DOWNTOWN MARKET?

The Streetscape project has really triggered what we believe will be the renaissance of the community, and Miracle Mile really is the core of the community. The Merrick Park development took away from downtown Coral Gables, but we think the market is big enough for both to succeed, and as we add more residential housing in the downtown we think it really becomes the true urban live, work, play community that changes everything.

We’ve watched, with the Streetscape completed, how as tenants put tables and chairs on the street sales jump up immediately by 40 percent.

SO YOU THINK THE STREETSCAPE PROJECT WILL HAVE A BIG IMPACT?

Giralda [on weekends] is packed now. It’s not busy – it’s packed. And it’s not [just] packed with people my age having a wonderful dinner. It’s packed with young people, and there’s music and activity, and energy, and I think you’ll see that now on Miracle Mile.

Look, we expected this to be the result of the Streetscape. We just didn’t expect it to be instantaneous. And it took tremendous guts, courage and foresight from our city leaders… We’ve worked hard to get everyone comfortable, including me standing up in a city commission meeting and urging the commission to vote in favor of it, including taxing us [property owners]. The properties on the block have paid 50 percent of the cost, which we believe to be well worth it.

HOW HAS YOUR BUSINESS CHANGED?

We had this giant suburban portfolio where we operated in a lot of municipalities. We never knew any of the elected officials. You just didn’t need to. You [only] needed to know the staff of building and zoning to get a building permit… Now, the government-relations part of our business has become gigantic, because we have much-smaller-in-square-footage but much-higher-in-price-per-foot and much-higher-profile properties in the heart of the community. So all of a sudden the city leaders really care about what you’re doing [and] we take the philosophy that if we do what’s good for the community, it’s also good for our property… So we fought like crazy and played a very active role in the Streetscape.

ARE YOU SEEING A DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFT IN THE DOWNTOWN?

You see it now. Go out on Thursday or Friday or Saturday nights, or for Sunday brunch, and look at who is going to Copper 29 or Plomo. It’s a whole different demographic. My age group is still patronizing lots of the table-service restaurants, but there is a whole new group. Where once was just Houston’s – now Hillstone – and Tarpon Bend, we’ve got House and Tap 42 and the addition of new cool places where people want to go and eat and drink and have fun. It has dramatically changed over the last year in Coral Gables, and we think there is more coming.

WHAT IS YOUR VIEW OF CORAL GABLES IN TERMS OF GROWTH CYCLE?

The surprise in Coral Gables is that our base of office space is almost as much as on Brickell Avenue. So, it has the best daytime population of any of our markets, other than Brickell. It’s why it was always a great restaurant location, because restaurants could do two meal segments [lunch and dinner], which they really couldn’t do anywhere else in Miami. If you are a restaurateur on the beach you just do dinner, for example… So the vision has to be that we need more housing in downtown Coral Gables, because having people that can take the elevator down from their apartment and walk out to go eat, to drink, to shop, to meet with friends, that’s what changes a city. When you go to great cities around the world, people live and work and eat all in the same place.

WHERE DO YOU SEE TERRANOVA’S ROLE IN THE COMMUNITY?

Today people seem to do everything online – they date online, they shop online, they order food online. They have a vastly different level of human interaction than they did in a different era… So providing meeting places, like a street front with tables and chairs and umbrellas, provides a place for human interaction. It’s a place where people get together. And that’s the future... We think that the widening of the sidewalks, enabling tables and chairs and the whole change of culture in downtown Coral Gables, will lead to continued growth.

SO YOU WERE PART OF THE STREET SCAPE PROJECT?

Yes, I went to meeting after meeting with the Cooper Robertson firm that did the designs, and a group of us got to give our input on lighting, and on the granite pavers and furniture and signage and all the things that make that Streetscape come together and be so effective.

TERRANOVA’S MIRACLE MILE PORTFOLIO

105 Miracle Mile 135-137 Miracle Mile

136 Miracle Mile 200-230 Miracle Mile 244 Miracle Mile 247 Miracle Mile 257-263 Miracle Mile 348 Miracle Mile 350 Miracle Mile 360 Miracle Mile