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Downtown Miami’s Flagler Station building—now home to a Zapatero shoe repair shop, a watch repairer and a Cuban eatery among other mom-and-pop stands—would be a technology hub with offices for startups and app makers from South Korea to Panama.

The boarded up, nondescript building next door to the west once was a Foot Locker and would reopen as a bustling food hall, international spice market and a food development research lab.

Two blocks north along Miami Avenue at the Blue Corner, where the buildings range from navy blue to sky blue, a micro-units apartment tower would rise.

This is the vision of developer Moishe Mana, who after amassing about 50 properties along and near Flagler Street became the biggest owner in downtown.

Mana wants to make the area the heart of a thriving technology industry where companies from Asia, the U.S. and Latin America set up offices, collaborate and create. This “Silicon Valley of Latin America,” as Mana calls it, would be a campus-like project where workers can live in his micro-units and walk to their offices as well as to restaurants, stores and bars that will set up in his buildings.

“Basically, we are building the infrastructure for all these companies. Imagine Miami is the head and the rest of Latin America is going to be the rest of the body,” Mana said. “It’s going to be a hub where people connect, collaborate, communicate with each other.”

His plan is big, bold and even daring. One thing it is not: fast.

Mana started buying buildings in late 2013, but the promise of breathing life into them remains unrealized. To skeptics, he just might be slowing downtown redevelopment by sitting on so many properties.

“If they are frustrated, what should I say?” Mana responded.

Each day his properties remain as they are, Mana said he is losing money. That’s why each day he is chipping away at the mammoth project, whether that’s meeting with Panama President Laurentino Cortizo to discuss how the country can be included in the project or with South Korean tech companies.

It’s time for the next chapter.

He is requesting permits from the city of Miami and Miami-Dade County to fix infrastructure — heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, electrical systems and roofs.

First in line for repairs are the 13-story office building at 155 S. Miami Ave., where Miami International University of Art and Design will move from 1501 Biscayne Blvd., and adjacent buildings in that block. They include the Metro Studio building at 4 SE First St.

Also part of the first batch is Flagler Station, the future tech hub at 48 E. Flagler St. It will be Miami’s version of Paris’ Station F, a tech hub that opened in a train station, only here it will be called Station H in an homage to Florida railroad pioneer Henry Flagler. Then there will be the old Foot Locker building at 38-44 E. Flagler St. for the envisioned food hall and spice market.

The plans for these buildings should come to fruition in two years, but Mana didn’t give a timeline for completion of the entire district.

Save for a few teardowns to make way for the micro-unit towers, Mana will preserve the buildings. He says he will bring them back to the old glory days of the 1900s, when downtown was booming, just with different types of tenants.

He likes fixing buildings instead of building anew like most developers. Downtown just inspired him, he added.

“It’s about building communities; you live-work-play. We are investors also in what’s coming in these communities. We are not just landlords,” Mana added.

That’s why he is biding his time, carefully curating the tenants so that he creates the neighborhood he envisions.

“I’ve done development, and I’ve learned my lesson. Once you give a tenant 20 years, then you cannot reverse it,” Mana said. “So it’s very important the curation and how you do it.”

If someone needs proof that he is working on his project, the recent approval of the Flagler Streetscape is it.

The Miami City Commission on July 25 voted in favor of a $24.4 million plan to make the street curbless, line it with cobblestones and make it more pedestrian friendly.

Work on the street started in 2017 but stopped after issues with the previous contractor. This is when Mana became part of the project, shelling out his own funds for a new design.

Mana and other new property owners can’t be blamed for sitting on their holdings given that Flagler’s future was uncertain until recently, said Terrell Fritz, executive director of the Flagler Business Improvement District.

“As the property owners have shared continuously, if there’s no predictability on the streetscape, who is going to sign a lease? I think that’s what really was holding this up,” Fritz added.

Boon for Some, Bust for Others

The dream of a thriving, bustling downtown remained elusive for years.

Just ask married couple Jesus Antonio Castro and Fanny de Castro.

The Colombian couple has had its El Palacio de Oro, or Golden Palace, watch repair and sales shop at Flagler Station for 20 years. In that time, at least four owners came in with grand plans to remodel but became disillusioned and did nothing, Jesus Castro said.

“After they are here a few months after owning this building, they realize that it is not profitable to invest money here because the premises aren’t rented,” Castro said.

Not enough parking deters foot traffic, he added.

If Mana’s project comes to fruition, plenty of foot traffic is expected. Exactly how small businesses like the Golden Palace will fare once Mana’s project comes alive remains to be seen.

In the booming Miami real estate market, redevelopment has come at a price of gentrification. Wynwood, an internationally recognized arts district that Mana jump-started with his investments there, saw many of its long-time residents leave, unable to cope with rising property values.

Mana opened an events and production venue, Mana Wynwood, on the southeast corner of Northwest Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street and also plans for a giant trade hub nearby.

“I do feel bad for people who got kicked out of the neighborhood,” he said. “But in the end of the day, Wynwood is servicing as a great cultural hub of Miami.”

In downtown, Raul Betancourt, manager at a jewelry store and pawn shop at Mana’s 200 N. Miami Ave. building, said he has the answer as to what will happen to downtown businesses like his.

On one side, it’s good news because it will bring more visitors to downtown and prop up struggling businesses. But then again they might not be able to stay long term.

“The rent is going to be too expensive,” Betancourt said.

Where Is the Money Coming From?

Mana’s downtown Miami vision proved a tough sell to financiers.

“It’s very difficult to explain to them. It’s something different,” he said.

Traditional investors issue loans for a specific project.

“The real estate investors invest in real estate. The technology investors invest in technology. Fashion invest in fashion. That’s what they know. But it’s very difficult to tell them, ‘Listen, the investment is not vertical. It’s horizontal.’” Mana said.

This means they are investing in the real estate, the tenants and the concept.

Mana, who Bloomberg estimated to have a net worth of $1.1 billion, so far financed his Wynwood project and downtown buys on his own.

This is changing as he said he secured $36 million for the first batch of downtown renovations but declined to disclose the lender.

He is targeting well-heeled families in Europe and Latin America as they have been more open to Mana’s vision, he said. In December, Mana said he will host these families in downtown to present his project.

It’s a win for them as well because they traditionally invest in luxury condominiums in South Florida, but his project would help them diversify and give them a greater return.

Mana’s downtown project is part of an even bigger plan that he says is more of a philosophy. It’s called Mana Common and includes similar projects in Jersey City and Chicago.

Next, he wants to raise $600 million from investors to “ignite” his Mana Common projects in downtown and Jersey City. The goal after that is $1 billion, he said.

In downtown Miami, Mana Common will be about connecting Latin American countries and Asian countries working on different technologies, allowing them to complement and collaborate, he said.

This will be a game-changer, he says, connecting a now fragmented industry where counties largely work in a silo and where Asian companies have had a hard time connecting with Latin American ones in part because of language barriers.

“And why is it necessary to do? When they want to create an app or technology, it’s only on the local basis. So the investors say, ‘Oh it’s only Colombia, it’s only Panama.’ So it’s only done on a country-to-country investment,” Mana said. “So the idea to bring all of them into one ecosystem that Argentina can do work together with Panama and Panama together with Peru and Peru with Chile and Chile with Mexico. Put them in one place so that we can really go ahead and build the infrastructure of Latin America.”

This also will help Miami by putting it at the center of this international tech hub and by diversifying its economy beyond tourism, he added.

“Definitely Miami needs to change. Until now it was a tourist destination and that’s it. Now we want to make Miami as a global trade hub, technology city. It’s very ambitious for me to say something like this. But I am putting my money where where my mouth is,” Mana said. “I am doing it. Maybe I fail. Maybe I succeed. God knows. But I am doing what I am saying. I just need everyone to be patient.”

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