A 56-acre site in the heart of Miami had been a bleak sight to the local community since the late 1800s until the mid-1990s. Formerly known as Buena Vista Yard, the area had housed various industrial facilities, such as a steel factory, fuel oil plant, and a shipping container storage facility. The City and local community were unhappy with the crime, soil and groundwater contamination, dust, and heavy truck traffic.
In August of 2002, Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc. (KHA) was approached by a private development firm that had entered into a contract to purchase the site. Since then, KHA has worked actively to transform what was once a bleak rail yard into Midtown Miami, a chic mixed-use development.
Perhaps one of the most noteworthy aspects of this project is how KHA engineers chose to address the site’s contamination. Hazardous pollutants such as arsenic, lead, and petroleum were a legacy of the century-long industrial activities on the site.
The firm’s first step was to set aside the standard site assessment and remediation process and have the entire site designated as a Brownfield Site. They then had to determine the best way to attend to the site’s contamination and still meet the project’s critical time and cost constraints. The best solution was to integrate environmental restoration into the land planning and civil design components of the project. This ambitious undertaking earned an unprecedented consent from Florida’s Department of Environmental Resources Management to use the development plan as the site’s actual remediation program. Midtown Miami also is one of the first re-development projects to apply engineering and institutional controls to a development with a residential component.
Today, the rebirth of Midtown Miami continues, and it is quickly becoming one of the most dynamic developments in South Florida.
