Russell Galbut’s plan for a $39.8 million Whole Foods Market-anchored retail building in Miami Beach is getting a kick start after nearly a decade of inactivity.
The Miami Beach Design Review Board on Tuesday approved the planned four-story project spanning 199,000 square feet at 1901 Alton Road. Miami-based Crescent Heights, led by Galbut, Sonny Kahn and Bruce Menin, is under contract to purchase the 1.3-acre site from Wells Fargo.
Crescent Heights would demolish the existing single-story building, currently occupied by a Wells Fargo branch. National grocer Whole Foods and a new Wells Fargo branch would occupy 38,100 square feet of ground-floor and mezzanine level spaces in the new building, documents filed with the city of Miami Beach show. The planned project would also have 277 parking spaces.
“We are eager to start the building permit process,” said Graham Penn, a land use attorney for Crescent Heights.
Penn informed the review board that the project is “essentially identical in design to one that was approved back in 2015,” but that Crescent Heights did not move forward with it at the time.
In November, Whole Foods signed a long-term lease with Crescent Heights, according to Traded. Galbut did not immediately respond to an email request for comment for more details about the lease, when Crescent Heights will finalize the purchase of the property at 1901 Alton Road and when construction is set to begin.
Crescent Heights also secured Whole Foods as the anchor tenant at Nema Miami, a mixed-use project in Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood that will have 50,000 square feet of retail space. In 2020, the national grocer signed a 20-year lease with six five-year renewal options, records show.
Whole Foods, a subsidiary of billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, paid $21 million for a downtown Miami commercial unit in January. The grocery chain acquired a 97,674-square-foot ground-floor space occupied by one of its stores inside the Met3 mixed-use tower.