Jose Gonzalez - President, GLC Real Estate

Jose Gonzalez was supposed to be a lawyer. Then Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida in 1992, and the entry-level job he'd taken at Miami-Dade's Building and Zoning Department to pay his way through FIU turned into a career. He learned construction and its regulatory side on his feet, in the middle of a region rebuilding itself.

At 22, when most of his peers were collecting diplomas, Armando Codina recruited him to work on Dolphin Mall. He never really left that world. When Codina Group merged into Flagler in 2006, he stayed on under Florida East Coast Industries, eventually rising to Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, the person responsible for the parts of development nobody claps for: land use, zoning, environmental, traffic, and the government relationships that decide whether a project ever gets out of the ground. His biggest stage was Brightline, the privately built rail line connecting Miami and Orlando, alongside the industrial buildout through Flagler Global Logistics that reshaped South Florida's warehouse map.

In this episode we go all the way back, family, upbringing, the version of Jose who thought he'd be arguing in front of juries instead of zoning boards. We get into what Andrew actually looked like on the ground, what Armando Codina saw in a 22-year-old, the low points he doesn't usually talk about, and what he thinks is genuinely broken about how Miami gets built. He also tells us what it means to have come full circle, back in the Codina orbit where the whole thing started.

Recorded at Buró, where we do our best work and drink our best drinks. Thanks to Mike Feinstein for the room and to Nick Garcia and the Vinya team for the pour. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. All right. Probably have to cut out the part of the bank bus. All right, Jose, welcome. Thank you. Uh we uh long time coming. I've you know the first time we met was probably 15 years ago in uh Steve Nostran's closer.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Oh the interesting man, that I remember that. Yeah, good guy. Steve was a great guy, man. Yes, I love Steve. I love Steve.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

It was when I was in the MRED program. I was a student there, and uh Jose was one of the guest speakers.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

I forgot what I talked about when I was in, I don't know if it was bright, was it Bright Lightning?

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Yeah, we're talking about trains. Yeah, we're talking about trains. Big train guy, yeah. I love trades. Yeah, so we're gonna talk a lot about trade today. But before we can do that, let's uh start it off with a cheers, Ben. Hey Jose, cheers. You can stay right there, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Cheers, salute, salun.

SPEAKER_02 1:10

Welcome to uh Bureau Co-working spaces. Shout out to Mike Feinstein for for allowing us to do the podcast here. Um, and also um we have a liquor sponsor, Vinya.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

Oh, yeah, they sent that box of Casa de Dragones.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Yeah, so uh um Jose picked that up the Casa de Dragones.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Nice, very smooth. I I've I've heard about it, never had it.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

So shout out to Nick Garcia on Kiva Skein for setting this up for us.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Shout out Vinya, yeah, this is delicious. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:38

Cool. So uh Jose, we're we're gonna like we're saying we're gonna talk a lot about trains. True. Um, well, this is really good, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

It is very it's very smooth. It's really good. It's gonna be my one of my new go-to ones for sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Yeah, it's the first time I've had the Anyahoo. It's really good. Yeah, um cool. So um, yeah, we uh we're gonna talk a lot about trains. You actually came in on on our MetroRail today. I did. So we like to see we love an urbanist that that practices what he what he preaches. You do a lot of did a lot of uh TOD, transit-oriented development. So it's uh it's our second guest in two weeks that have has rolled in here on the train. That's true. You called it too, didn't you? That's right. And uh it's Jose's first podcast. Wow, yeah, congrats. We're not gonna go easy on it.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

No, I don't expect you to. I like the hard questions. I don't mind them.

SPEAKER_02 2:23

Gotcha. You came from the wrong place, Jose.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Trust me, it can't have any harder than county commission thing. So they wouldn't.

SPEAKER_02 2:31

Oh, this is gonna be a lot easier than that. Um, well, cool, Jose. So uh, you know, I don't know if you've listened to some of the podcasts. You have cool.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Um very diverse, which is pretty cool. Yeah, which I liked about that because it wasn't like any specific topic. You guys go cover the gamut on some more stuff, yeah, which is nice.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

It's all it's all real estate-ish related. Yeah. Um but uh But I do have different perspectives.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

I like the different perspectives.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Yeah, we do too. Um it's it, you know, there's so much that's involved in real estate development from the developers to the people that sell it to the people that operate it. Um, so so we have we have a we've had an awesome uh guest on this podcast. And uh I think we're gonna continue as as we as we have people like you that are like, oh, this is a good experience. Then we ask you, hey, you got someone you can we can bring on the podcast? So uh hopefully it'll be a good experience for you today, and uh you'll recommend some people for us. Absolutely. Um, so uh we want to go way back. Um, are you from Miami?

SPEAKER_00 3:30

No, I was uh born in Cuba. Okay, oh yeah. I was born in at Gisat, uh Cuba, which is just south of Havana. What year were you born? I was born in 1973. Okay, came here uh during the 80s. I'm trying to remember the month, but I can't remember the month right now. But it was I was six years old. So I was a young kid and uh had to get out of Cuba because my father talked a lot of shit about the government and they were about to throw his ass in jail. So like every good Cuban had to flee in the middle of the night, and we ended up coming. Uh we were supposed to come uh through Marielle, but one thing happened, and we didn't end up coming through there. And uh through the grace of God, we were able to get uh a flight out of Cuba. And um and so what year did you come here? It was in 1980. 1980. And so we ended up in New Jersey.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

So that uh uh where'd you end up in Elizabeth, New Jersey?

SPEAKER_00 4:17

I wish it was Elizabeth, it was Newark, New Jersey, which is uh Newark? Newark, and if you've been to Newark, it's a shithole. It is a shithole. All right, and uh shout out to the Newark people, but uh those guys uh really you know gave me a different perspective of it, uh that especially my my parents that uh had nothing and they know the language uh to go up there and be a Cuban in in New Jersey where there was no uh multilingual stuff during the time.

SPEAKER_02 4:41

But because during that time, the the the Cubans either came to Miami, they went to New Jersey, which was a bit of a Union City was the place we yeah where we went to the movies to see Scarface.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

I remember that seeing the Scarface and uh dubbed in Spanish in Union City, in a theater in Union City. And uh it was, you know, it gave us a perspective of what the rest of the world saw the Cubans as. And so it's interesting in the times we live now that I've seen, you know, how the country that I loved where I was born, and the country that adopted us that I love even more, because you know, one of the things that I believe every immigrant, you become more patriotic when when somebody extends their open hands to you. So I'm a big believer in in uh making sure the living the American dream. You got an opportunity, don't screw it up. Yeah. So that was one of the things my parents, you know, emphasized on me is like make sure that you do it better than we did it.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

So let me ask you a question though. You said your your dad was talking a lot of shit about the Cuban government. What what did your parents and your grandparents what was their business in Cuba?

SPEAKER_00 5:45

So my father was an accountant and uh he actually studied here in the US. Oh, really? My father knew a little bit of English because my grandfather used to be in the tobacco business and he brought and it was actually interesting, he was in the logistics business, so you guys will appreciate that being warehouse guys. They uh would do a lot of shipping between Tampa and uh and and Havana.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

There was a big uh trade between Tampa and tobacco back in back before communism, of course.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

And uh Ybor City, right?

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Like that's that's the traditional Tampa warehouse area.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

That started like that, and it's obviously uh has a lot of roots with the Cuban uh uh families, and and we ended up uh my father knew enough about the US that that you know we said, look, let's let's go. But it was uh because of the fact that it was so bad towards the end of the 70s. It was the oil crisis during there, and the whole world was in the growth crisis, and Cuba was suffering. It was when we started happening, the blackouts and stuff like that happened in the late 70s, and and it was just tough. It was getting worse and worse and worse. And so my father, you know, it was a small town. So if you talk shit in a small town, everybody knows it. Yeah, and so my father, uh, and there's always people that are in the Cuban government, did a lot of bad by putting people as spies in in in every town.

SPEAKER_02 6:59

Yeah, so they would go have a lot of uh and so this is late 70s, it's this is 20 years into the revolution, right? So like things are pretty ingrained already, right? Like very the whole spy network is is in full force.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

And and that's where you know, from overnight people were disappearing. And so uh we actually disappeared in the middle of the night too, because but for a different reason we're we're trying to get out, and so there was during that time, uh, Fidel had said whoever wants to leave can leave. If you remember that that's how my remote lip so during that same year, it people were leaving, but we had to figure out different ways of getting out. So we were stuck in Mariel, but we never got to leave by boat because they would send the boat and the boat that was for us, they would put prisoners on.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

Yeah, and so a lot of good people left, but Fidel also cleaned out his prisons.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

That's correct, and so mixed it in with the bad people, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:49

And uh and they and a lot of those folks, I mean, there were people that were violent criminals, a lot of mentally ill as well, but ended up here in Miami through that that boat list.

SPEAKER_00 8:00

They did. And then and I remember that uh, you know, uh talking uh to my parents, it was more like, hey, we're just gonna go on a trip. Yeah. I was six years old, didn't really have an understanding for it.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

But I remember 3 a.m. we're about to go on a trip. Let's go. In the middle of the night and early flight.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

And there was like seven families that left with us at the same time. Uh, and I was talking to uh our my partner now in real estate, and uh he's he he's from the same town I am. Uh ironically enough, he's he was in the insurance, he's in the insurance business, and he's now investing in real estate, and he tells me the story, like as from the perspective of the guy who stayed behind. He's like, You guys disappeared in the middle of the night, and we had no idea what had happened. They thought the government took you, they thought that you guys were you know the whole families, and and there was no time for cell phones, media. So it was a little bit of time before they found out that we were back in the United States. Uh, but it was you know months before they actually found out. And it was interesting to see that perspective because they had a whole different vision, and it was the government did it on purpose to scare the people into it. But you know, fortunately we landed here in Miami.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

Oh, so so you landed, you had to go. We came in Miami. So you flew from Cuba to Miami, Miami, and what year did you come to uh to Miami?

SPEAKER_00 9:10

And it was 1980, and then and literally enough, they shipped us out to New Jersey. Who shipped you out there? Uh my uncle and my aunt and my aunt said basically there's no work in Miami. 1980, Miami was it was a retirement community. Yes. And so my father was looking for work, there wasn't any work, but up in New Jersey, the factories and that had a lot of work. And so between family members, we ended up in in another family member's house in New Jersey. And my mom was a school teacher. She ended up teaching Spanish at the local school. My father worked as a butcher first, and and he was an accountant, so he was a good one. But then he ended up being like the manager of a store, and he ended up, you know, pulling himself up by the bootstraps and getting his career out the way and his own business and stuff like that. And what what kind of business did he have? He went into the food distribution business in New Jersey. Uh, but then like every good Cuban, it was too cold. Yeah. So we ended up back in Miami.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

So when did what year did you guys end up back in Miami?

SPEAKER_00 10:02

We ended up back in Miami in '86. Uh, and it was funny because my sister gets married in '85, goes on her honeymoon to Aruba, comes to Miami, says, I love Miami, I'm staying. My father says, We're leaving New Jersey, we're coming to Miami. And so that changes. And then I got here and I was So you were 13 when you I was getting into here into uh a I was 13. I was about to uh went to eighth grade here in a public school, but then my mom said, Hey, we gotta find another, because I went to Catholic school in New Jersey. So we're being big Catholics, uh, they gave us me a choice between going to Balen or Columbus.

SPEAKER_03 10:35

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

And I fell in love with Balen because it had a pool. And uh it coming from New Jersey where there are no pools, that was like thought this was like a spa retreat, right? And it was like, this is gonna be the coolest like country club school that I was gonna live in. But uh was very fortunate to to go to the school, made a lot of friends. Um, and at the and unfortunately, my father passes away when I'm 14.

SPEAKER_02 10:56

Oh shit.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

So it's one of those grow up really fast lessons. And you have siblings? I have an older sister, but she's 10 years older. She's the one that got married.

SPEAKER_02 11:03

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

And uh, and I was following her, but it allowed us to have a little bit of you know, the you know, get get restart again. So when life when life is like that, you're you're it's okay to restart. So you so you were how old when your father passed away? 14.

SPEAKER_02 11:19

Dang.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

So the year after we got here, I had my ninth grade in Balen, like I started Balen ninth grade. Uh he ends up uh passing away from a massive heart attack.

SPEAKER_02 11:27

Holy shit.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Uh and that, you know, life deals you those cards, but I was very fortunate because it takes away but also gives you. So my mom, hardworking uh between her and my grandmother, they raised me. And your mom continued teaching here? My mom continued teaching here, and then she ended up uh having a she had retired because my father had a good business. And so uh she ends up having to go back to work. She goes to work at Ocean Bank, uh, doing something she had never done in banking. But she, you know, took took the challenge on, did it, and uh helped put me through Balen. And, you know, I got a job at 14, you know, working at the Burger King. You were working at the Burger King. So was that your first job? That was my well, that was my first job that was part-time. And then quickly enough, we knew that $3.35 an hour is not gonna get you much. Yeah. So I had to get a better job. And I ended up working at a local supermarket that you got tips and stuff like that. So I was in, I was able to make my way through that and there put myself through Balen.

SPEAKER_02 12:28

So through high school, you you were working at supermarkets.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Every time I I I my mom used to drop me off, and then I used to get a dropped off at the uh supermarket after school by a buddy where I take my bike and uh ended up, you know, uh through school, and ultimately I ended up getting a job at uh a fast food joint called All in One, which was a concept that uh Pepsi at the time did with Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Pizza Hut all together. Oh, I think I remember that. Yeah, it was uh this it was a short-lived thing that they did. But it again taught me the value of having to work for somebody. You know, a lot of friends, you know, worked for their parents and didn't really have the opportunity to have a boss, right? Because your parents were your boss. This really gave me the ability to have a boss uh a early on and appreciate a good boss from a bad boss and a good business from a bad business. But um I did that to my senior year and then when I graduated from Berlin.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

Um, you know, it's funny because going back to high school real quick, I mean, so you're you're basically going to school full-time, and then in the evenings you're you're working.

SPEAKER_00 13:37

In the evenings I was working. I actually actually at one point I had two jobs. So I I had my second job was at FIU. I had uh I was able to get a job there taking care of the special collections, and somebody, you know, the students would come check out books and I would give it to them. So whenever I wasn't working in one place, I was working in the other. But it was it taught me the work ethic that I have today. Yeah. I mean, for me, there's no day off, right? There's we we grind until we grind and we get things done.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

And uh what what were your favorite subjects in school?

SPEAKER_00 14:07

I loved history. Yeah, in fact, when I graduated from Berlin, I and I started in Miami Dade, I wanted to be a history teacher. One of my favorite teachers was Pat Collins.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

Holy shit. You know, hold on a second. So Pat Collins, his son, is a very good friend of mine. No shit. Yeah. Um, like our kids. Wow, what a small world.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Is it Benna?

SPEAKER_02 14:26

No, it's uh Jack and uh and Ryan. And I'm at I'm at Pat's house regularly. He just sent me a text this morning. Hey, we're watching the USA game uh tomorrow. Cuts the but I hear I hear Pat Callins is is a legend. He is a total blend legend. Like in when it came to history, he is a total blend legend.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

He gave me my love for what I think is government, and what I do a lot today, we'll talk a little bit about that. Uh how I sort of tailored it, how my career ended up taking me something where I I learned about legislation and stuff like that. But I I got that love from Pat. So going to Miami Dade, again, I started started working um uh in something downtown. So I got a job back in the day, and uh, you know, we had the classified. So we had to open up the classified, and the county was hiring clerks to to work part-time. This is 1991. And uh I got a job as a as a permit clerk in the building and zoning department at the county, right down the street from here. And uh I was going to downtown uh campus, the Wolfson campus.

SPEAKER_02 15:24

This isn't what you were when you're in college already, or high school.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

I I left when Berlin. When I graduated from Berlin, I ended up going to Miami Dade. And the story there is kind of interesting because uh I graduated, I wanted to have a lot of fun, right? Because I was working, so got my summer off, and I'm like enjoying it, and I totally forgot to register for college because I wasn't, you know, I knew that I wasn't gonna go. Were you a good student? I was a horrible student. Oh, yeah. I was a solid finally, we got one of some of the solid C student. Oh, that's a solid C student. Cheers to that. I'll do that. Yeah, cheers to that. Cheers to that.

unknown 15:57

Cheers to that study.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

Cheers to the C students. But cheers. Hey, I you know it's funny because my kids are great students, and I tell them, you know, I'm the you don't want to be like me when you grow up. You want to be something you're as a student. Don't follow my tracks. But they follow my wife's tracks, which is she's a wonderful student. And so they followed her tracks in school and they've done wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Why do you think you were a bad student? Because like everyone has their own explanation, but you just weren't. What about school didn't captivate you?

SPEAKER_00 16:22

It it it was just I truthfully, it was the fact that I didn't have the time to really do the homework. I did enough to get there, but it was like I had enough that I would pass, and my mom would would leave me alone. And my mom being a teacher, my yeah, right. So that was a tough thing. But I mean, listen, you're you know, you're you're working half the time, you know, like you're well, that's why I think my mom was very lenient with me because she knew that I wasn't just going off and and screwing around with my buddies. Yeah, she knew that I was doing something that was teaching me more than probably what school was going to be teaching me, yeah, all honestly. And it's not that's not a it's not a bad dig on on school because I told my I've always told my kids you gotta you gotta do great in school so you can have those opportunities. I got lucky, and I'll tell you, I've you know been very blessed. Like I lost my father early in life, but God gave me a lot more doors opened and and and and connecting me to people of that would actually give me the ability to be more successful in life and and and grant those opportunities uh by no intention of mine. I it was it was sort of like dropped on my lap uh because at the county again, I forgot to register and I go to Miami Date College, and this is back then when the registrar had a paper thing, and you would walk up to her and say, Is this class available? Yeah, and she's like, No. And the Kendall campus, which is closer to my house, no classes were available. And I thought my mother was gonna kill me because I didn't register for college. So then the young lady says, You know, there's another campus downtown. And I go, Downtown, there's a campus, that's perfect. I'll go downtown, not knowing where downtown was, truthfully, how far I get there and how everything else. I end up getting there, and um, you know, I said, you know, being trying to be efficient, I got to get a job to help pay for college. So I had a job at the county, so I had to do all my classes at 6:50 in the morning downtown during 1991. So think about that setting. Yeah, this was not what it is today. Oh, yeah, where you have all this development, you have some great stuff going on in downtown. This was a rough neighborhood. Downtown's still a shithole.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

Don't you don't things haven't changed that much.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

It's a neighborhood in transition, is what I want to say.

SPEAKER_02 18:23

That's a polite way to put it. It's been in transition for 15 years. Listen, we're rooting for downtown. We've been rooting for downtown since I've been here 25 years. Fuck.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Yeah. But but that's where I end up uh again working at the county, and this is 1991, 1992, Hurricane Andrew happens. Yeah, I was working at the building of zoning department. So just put yourself on the river? No, right here. That's you're talking city of Miami. I'm talking uh got it county. I work. Government center? The government center. Yeah, so I was at government center, 10th floor, and uh ripe age of I think it was 18. I just turned 18. And so and where did you grow up in Miami? I grew up by uh Westchester. Okay. Where I still live today. I knocked down a house and rebuilt it there because I love I love the uh the Westchester hood.

SPEAKER_02 19:04

Okay, I like it.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

And so staying staying true to the roots. I love it, and uh, you know, it's raised my family there, wouldn't it change a thing about it? How many kids do you have? I have three kids. How old? Uh 26-year-old, my daughter, she's in uh medical school at UVA now.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Uh so what I didn't do, she's done it for me. She went through she went through Columbia University. She got the brains from your wife. She got all of my kids got my wife's brains. But they got my work ethic. I'll give you that. All right. They got my work ethic, and although not not not not digging on my wife, but uh I am definitely uh always hyper and and and getting things done. I have uh very little patience for for things to get done, and and and a lot of times you got to be able to have that, that drive. Yeah, and they have that drive. So between the smarts and the drive, they've been able to be very successful. And I got uh one that just graduated from UM, he's working at Jackson, he'd studied occupational therapy, that's my middle one. Okay, and then my youngest is uh in BC at going this is third year uh at BC at Boston College. So they've done very well for themselves.

SPEAKER_02 20:01

And what's his major that wanted BC Economics, economics?

SPEAKER_00 20:04

He's probably the one that's gonna end up working with me. Yeah, because the other two medical you did political science, right?

SPEAKER_02 20:09

I did poly science.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Yeah, and I did poli sci not because I wanted uh to go into political science. It was just sort of like I took so many different classes that they said, what's the one degree that can capture everything? And that was political science. And I wanted at one point be a lawyer, uh, never went to law school. Um did you graduate from where did you graduate? Did you graduate? I graduated from FIU. I ended up uh finishing date and went to FIU. Um and what it and how it ended up uh getting to FIU uh was again uh working at the county, going forward part-time. I got married in '97, and you know, still going through uh going part-time because I was working on the You got married young.

SPEAKER_02 20:47

You were like 21, 22 when you got a little older.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

I like 23 when I got my wife was 21. I was uh 23, and uh ends up uh where we uh when I end up uh uh wanting to graduate, my my mom had told me, you gotta have graduate before your kids are born because then you'll never graduate. And my wife was like eight months pregnant when I graduated from FIU. But I graduated, put the degree away, and I kept working. But I gave my mom and fulfilled my mom's dream of me having a college degree. Uh my sister has uh she she ended up when she came because she ended up going to Rutgers University up in New Jersey, uh, but she was a librarian. So my sister was following my mom's footstep in the librarian uh category with you know educational side of it. But I didn't I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I mean, I loved history. I when I started as a history teacher, you had I took a lot of history uh classes, constitutional law classes and stuff like that. So I loved that that that aspect of what I studied.

SPEAKER_02 21:44

But you were you were basically on the the five or six year program to to graduate, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Oh, two thousand. So I tell people a lot of people go to school for nine years and they're called doctors. Okay. Not not political science majors.

SPEAKER_02 21:59

But but you're You're working at the county, the hurricane hits in 92. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

And then all of a sudden they say, Hey, by the way, you that don't know anything about plans, now you're reviewing plans. Because that's how it was. It basically said, you know, we need people to review zoning plans. And so I got thrown into working and reviewing zoning plans. That's where I started getting the love for you know looking at the code and understanding the code. And it's something that I it was a bug that bit me and I really enjoyed it. Uh to the not that I understand the code so well that you know, part of my job today, I actually changed the code to benefit us, the development community.

SPEAKER_02 22:33

So interesting. So um but you're you're you're basically approving plans for projects that are within unincorporated Miami Dade County. You got it. Um for the zoning side of the zoning side of things. Um and and a lot of that, which was where Hurricane Andrew hit the South, was unincorporated Miami Dade County.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

It was. Kendall was uh between Country Walk, Kendall, all that area got rebuilt. Yeah. And so we had a lot to do with reviewing those plans. And and at the same time, if you remember, then we had a growth spurt in the in the early 90s where a lot of homes were being built out west because people were leaving South Aid and Kendall to go to uh Pembroke Pines. And that's how Western Broward was built, was right after the hurricane.

SPEAKER_03 23:20

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

But then developers came back and said, we got to start rebuilding in Miami Day County. And then that's what gave the birth to Kendall, right or wrong. You know, there was a lot of uh communities that were built probably without infrastructure, transit and such. So now we're seeing that that uh be a topic of a lot of discussion in our field today, where you know, a lot of the hurry up and build uh attitude that that happened in those those times, now we're paying for those sins because there wasn't infrastructure that's thought about it. It was just like get off and build it because we want the tax revenue. We want, we don't want people leaving Miami Dade County. So that was the mindset back then. The mindset today, obviously, things change. People are like, okay, I'm here now. I don't want anything other development unless some infrastructure comes with it.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

It's interesting to hear that perspective, that that longer timeline perspective, because everyone bitches about transit here and don't really take into consideration why we don't have transit. That's part of the reason. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

And it was, I mean, I would tell you, the government had a lot of fault at that because if they would have stuck to their guns and had master plans that said, hey, we should, you know, as we build, we should let transit continue along the way. Rail had the ability to be there. Uh, but for one reason, but but we really had shitty zoning in place too, right? We had this was a bedroom community.

unknown 24:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

The zoning that was done here, if you look at our master plan, there's more yellow on that plan than anything else. And yellow is residential. Single family. Single family. And that's and that's what I think. People are complaining, oh, because there's affordability housing, but but look at all the estate density, look at all these big homes, and look at this. We encourage that. And and when was the zoning code, you know, really written?

SPEAKER_02 24:55

What year?

SPEAKER_00 24:56

You know, the code, the Miami Dade County was in the 1950s. It was redone in the 70s, but it's it's now evolving, right? And that's one of the things that I I I sort of pride on working through and changing the code to mean a lot of things. And you know, we can point to Brightline as one of those things because Brightline was one of those uh projects that we had to get really creative on the zoning because, you know, we were in the city of Miami, and uh and the city of Miami was not a place you wanted to do permitting in. Right. I think still a little bit like that. Oh, it's a disaster. It's starting, it's starting to to come out of it. It's not, it's not.

SPEAKER_01 25:31

But I'm in the middle of a project right now, it's terrible.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

You're probably uh it's terrible dead on on that. But yeah, the city of Miami was something we we wanted to avoid as far as from the permitting side of it, but we wanted to get Bright Line done, and Miami 21 didn't help that. So that allowed us to do the rapid transit zone, which is what you see all around here now. We were the first private uh rapid transit zone, and uh that was because we helped rewrite the code to allow that. But that was that was uh the the the rapid transit zones are are for county or is they're all for county, but the interesting thing is the rapid transit zone was done for metro rail, yeah. So it was done for metro rail because it went through cities, and the county didn't want the cities' zoning codes to stop Metrorail. Yeah, so the county has preemption over the cities, yeah. So they preempted the cities and said, Hey, we're gonna build this corridor and this zoning, and you have no say in it. And so, interestingly enough, these rapid transit zones were written when in the 80s. Okay, so when Metro was done, I think Metrorail was done between 80 and 84. That's kind of yeah, that's pretty forward-thinking. And it was, and it was it was more to protect the county's assets and and the way that uh Metro was developed, and so it did that, but it did it for itself. Um but interestingly enough, if you know the history of MetroRail, MetroRail was the former alignment of the Florida East Coast Railway down to the Keys. Yep. And so it followed US One The right of way existed, and it existed, and then it goes down the the the busway today.

SPEAKER_02 27:01

Yeah, and it goes You know, even if you go down to uh Dayton, I've I've ridden my bike around there, you can actually see tracks there. Oh, really? Yeah, there's still some old tracks there. There's some most old tracks that just paved over them. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Yeah, and part of that is the old Ludlum trail that I'm sure Frankie talked to you about. Uh, because that's one of the assets that that uh Frankie and I worked together to get into the the public hands, um, which is what first started off as like you know a little contentious because we wanted to develop it as a whole different scheme. And thanks to Frankie's persistence, we ended up doing what we did. Did you and Frankie go to school at the same time? Frankie's younger. I'm older than you. So we we we sort of had friends in common, yeah, but I wasn't a runner. I was you know more of a baseball player. Like running was a punishment for me. If he told me to go run around the bases, it was because I did something wrong. And so uh it ended up that's how we reconnect, that's how Frankie and I actually reconnected after all those years. I was on Ludlum Trail and it's it had a good story. But because part of the property downtown, remember it was the Metro Corridor, they had accidentally zoned our private property with the the overlay of the RTZ. So a light bulb came on and says, Hey, half my property is in Miami and half of it is in the RTZ. So I had Miami 21 for half the property, and this one. So at the time we went to the commissioners and we're bringing, you know, it was called the Olive Board Florida when it first started, if you guys remember.

SPEAKER_03 28:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

And uh that's the the uh original name for the Brentline uh Anthony. And then it was Virgin, wasn't it? Well, Virgin was a brief marketing thing that they ended up doing for trying to grow uh the brand.

SPEAKER_02 28:35

That kind of like it happened during COVID. It came and went like it. It came and went.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

As quickly as we announced it, it ended up not working out. And uh, but when we started it, uh we looked at the the fact that the the code was like that, and we went to the commissioner and said, We're gonna bring you this great train system, but all we need from you is to give us the zoning. And of course, they loved it, and City of Miami went along with it, the county went along with it, and then we established the rules for that. And then it took off. You saw what's happened at all the Metro Rail stations, right? In fact, I'm doing one of the developments now at the Palmetto Station with my partner. We're working on uh the Palmetto Crossing, which is a it's 1100 units at the end of the line uh near Durral in the Medley uh area, where we're gonna be putting uh workforce housing there and affordable housing.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

So well, so let me ask you a question. Just let's take it back to the 90s because you you're you're you're working for uh the county, Hurricane Andrew comes. Um and then how long were you working at the county for?

SPEAKER_00 29:35

So I was in starting building and zoning, and then uh you guys will probably remember because you maybe a little younger than me, but in 94, the county gets sued by the EPA and uh for the sewer moratorium. So so that's when the life of Durham starts. Everybody who knows and dislikes Durham, yeah. I ended up getting recruited by Durham.

SPEAKER_02 29:54

Oh, so you're part of the problem, is what you said.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

I I I I I was seen as part of the problem, but I actually ended up, it was the best thing that ever happened to me because uh that's how I ended up starting really propelling my career. I started working.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

So Durham is Department of Environmental Protection, environmental management.

SPEAKER_00 30:12

Management. Yeah. So Durham uh at the time was just environmental wetlands, stuff like that. They really didn't deal in the sewer stuff. It was not that wasn't something they dealt with. But because the EPA is suing them, they had a consent decree. Durm became the enforcement agency for EPA against Wazda, right? Because Wazda was the one that got sued. And so it was because they weren't maintaining.

SPEAKER_02 30:33

And Wazda's uh waste water and sewer department. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 30:35

And when I mean the water and sewer department, they got sued. And basically they had this consent degree, and that's for all the allocations and and all the different things you got to do today uh to be able to certify sewers and things like that. It wasn't as formalized as a process as we have today. But the interesting part was that that that allowed me to meet a lot of folks in Durham and where I ended up working for the director of Durham doing the environmental hearings. I I go through uh just being a plan reviewer, and uh, luckily enough, the boss ahead of the time went to public works and she promoted me to go work with a director. And that's where I meet uh the folks at the Kadena group. And they were planning uh well, they did various projects in the Beacon Center. You guys know Beacon Center, and so I knew them through all that. And this gentleman, Rafael Radon, who used to be the building and zoning director, approached me and said, I don't hire you because we're starting this project called Dauphin Mall. And we need somebody that can help do all the entitlements with them. And so I get recruited uh to go work for Kadina. What year was this? This was 1997. Okay. So the year you get married. The year I I literally started, I I started in September, uh, early September, and then at the end of September, I said I gotta go off for a week as I'm getting married. So I got married, uh, started a whole new life, but it was the best decision ever. Uh and by the way, it was it was coming from a world where you know I told my mom, hey, you know, you want security. I was like working for the government. Everybody's like, hey, that's a secure position. You'll never get fired there.

SPEAKER_01 32:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

And so I said, you know, you got to take risks. I said, you know what? I'm so young that what happens, what's the worst that can happen? They fire me and I'm gonna have to come back here. But you got a kid on the way, no? I had no kid on the way, no kid on the way. I got married and my kids came a couple of years later. Okay. In 2000, uh, three years later the kid came. But I was um very blessed that, you know, I had my wife was very supportive. She said, let's you know, go off and do it. Let's let's go see what happens. And was your wife working at the time? She was, she had she was just her senior year in college. Okay. So then she starts working in finance uh in uh Ocean Bank. She worked for Ocean Bank as a banker. Gotcha. Uh, but it was great because she had gone to FIU and we had, you know, it was a young couple starting their life here. So it allowed me to you know cut my teeth on a lot of interesting things because uh one of the things that Kadena did, which was very brilliant of him, was he would he would shop us out. And what I mean by that is it we did all the entitlements for the company, but he also allowed us to do work for other developers. I had clients at Lenar, Show Mahomes, uh, all the big builders now. Prologis at the time was A and B back then. If you remember, AMB uh was one of our partners, but we would do work as consultants for them in the same space. And so I learned the business by fixing other people's problems. So you had a problem with zoning, you had a problem with plating, you had a problem with Durham, you came to see us, we would and most of these projects were were unincorporated in Miami Dade County.

SPEAKER_02 33:27

They were all over. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

So I we did it all in South Florida. So we did it all the way from Palm Beach down to Miami Dade. How did people know that they could hire you? It was because they knew Armando. Just word of mouth, okay. It was new Armando, so uh they knew that they, you know, within it's the real estate community is a very small community, especially you know, the land use community. The lawyers, most of the people who send us stuff would be the land use lawyers. Hey, go hire these guys because they can navigate the the inners inner parts of the county and and the regulatory side of it. So we were able to get creative of how it did things, and and that's where, you know, having worked for the government, the rules I know could always be changed. Yeah, people are like, oh no, you got to get a variance. No, no, but instead of getting a variance, let's go change the code to allow what we want to do. And so that creativity I learned from working with guys like that, fixing other people's problems. And and you worked for the county for five years? Six years. Six years. Yeah, six years. No, no, yeah, 91 to 97.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

Yeah. So you learned a lot because you got to see not only the behind the curtain on the government side, but then everyone else's problems gave you great perspective into anything that Codena might want to do.

SPEAKER_00 34:30

It did. It did. It also you know showed us the the do's and don'ts of doing this some of the stuff is because somebody else banged their head on the wall and said, okay, let's not do it that way because you learned on someone else's. That's not the right path. So and and and it and it's a great lesson in life. You know, uh, I think if you you know keep your eyes open and stuff like that, you can learn a lot from you know helping others.

SPEAKER_01 34:48

Well, and you learn from other people's mistakes, not your own. Correct. On someone else's dealer. No, yeah, and that was it.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

And they paid us to fix their problems, which is actually very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:56

And uh, and then that's you know, that's where I've evolved my career. I always worked on that. And then when um, you know, fast forward, we did a bunch of industrial projects with the Beacon Lakes. Uh we did Beacon Center with Lakes, with Cadena.

SPEAKER_02 35:08

But you did you did Dolphin Mall first.

SPEAKER_00 35:10

Dolphin Mall was the first one. Dolphin Mall.

SPEAKER_02 35:12

Let's talk about Dolphin Mall because that's a that's a fucking monster project. Monster project.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

And uh that was that was that was one of an interesting uh project when I first met Michael Schwertlow.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

Oh, is that right? Oh shit. Did you guys know Michael? That guy's a legend.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Yeah, you know, he's a freaking legend. He's a legend. He's a badass. He's so awesome. Michael's a badass.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

You know, we when we interviewed him, we went to his office because he was, you know, we had to we we had to get him smoking.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

Well, I'll tell you the story about smoking. You know, and and and uh and so young kid, I'm sitting in the in uh in the conference room. It's Armando Kadena, it's Jeb Bush, it's uh Rafael Radon and some other project managers, and here I am a fly in the wall because I'm a nobody in that room. And we're waiting for a meeting with Michael Swordlow.

SPEAKER_02 35:52

And this is pre uh the older brother being president, and pre-him being governor, and pre-him being a this is '97.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

This is '97. So Michael walks in a little late and uh sits on. And uh he had a nice, very polished office. And here comes Michael, sits down, pulls out his camels, lights up a cigarette, which you're not allowed to smoke indoors, but you know, Michael Schwartz.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

Not even in the 90s. He doesn't give a no, they had just cut it off.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

Um they had just cut it off. And uh and Michael lights up uh Armando's eyes open toward the up. He'd see also the secretary, get an ashtray. Nobody has an ashtray. You know, they bring in a cup with some water for Michael, and Michael just keeps on being Michael, he just you know, smokes it all there. We finished the meeting, and then Armando says, We gotta have this place like, you know, dry cleaned and cleaned up. We had to get that. It smelled like camel, man. It was camel. So, and uh, and so I learned a lot from guys like Michael and like Armando of how you know to view deals and to understand how they made decisions on the stuff. And that's something that you know it's again, it's it's life teaching the lessons you won't learn in any school or any classroom.

SPEAKER_01 37:09

What did you do on the Dolphin Mall project? Is that all entitlement work?

SPEAKER_00 37:12

So that was back when there was DRIs. If you guys remember developments of regional impact, no. If you guys, if you guys never heard of that, you you hadn't been so in in the business when you had these massive scale projects.

SPEAKER_02 37:21

How many acres was Dolphin Mall?

SPEAKER_00 37:23

Dolphin Mall was uh I think it was 300 and change. I remember it was 300 and change. It went from 25th Street all the way to 12th Street, and um and right off the turnpike, and we we you know worked on a turnpike exit uh in interchange uh agreement. I mean, there was a lot of things that you learn that I had never done before in my life. So that's massive. You're dealing with county, you're doing with people I don't even know, but it's it's like you know, you figure it out. You're told, hey, go figure this out, and you off went off and figured it out. And uh, and I was very blessed that I had a lot of great mentors uh that showed me the right path. And we've we've had a lot of great alumni that came through that organization that are today very successful guys uh that have done wonderful things for this community. So that's that was uh interesting. And and to also see how they make decisions, you know, like going through the whole planning of them all. You know, the world was a lot different for retail back then as it is today. But, you know, and and also learning when you go to hearing, you have people that may not want what you want. And you have to learn how to navigate your adversaries. You know, at the time we had uh down the street was International Mall. Simon wasn't happy that we were putting a new mall less than a mile from theirs, and it was an outlet mall. So our things were we're an outlet mall. We're not we're not a retail mall, we're a different mall. But still it we it will and and time told the truth, which is it pulled business, and international mall isn't what it is, what what it was back then. Dolphin took all, ate its lunch, and and then some. And so International Mall has had gone through its evolution now, but it was it it uh it was worried at the time, and and those guys were worried about it, so they came out to oppose us. So having to learn with opposition and how you deal with that, those are gonna be life lessons that uh still hold true.

SPEAKER_01 39:04

So International Mall, did they redevelop it? Because last time I remember going there, it was pretty dumpy. I don't think I've been there. I went to the DMV there when I first moved here. Well, you went to Maul the Americas, that's what I'm thinking of. Sorry, sorry, sorry. So I'll fight 2082.

SPEAKER_00 39:17

Which is another one that funny enough got killed by International Mall. So, like every every other thing that keeps growing eats up the smaller one. And so that's what ends up happening. These malls have taken a new life of their own, and now a lot of them are just redeveloping into having either multifamily, you've seen they're selling off parcels. I think Armando's buying like West Line Mall and Armando bought the uh the old Seer site and he's doing some apartments there. So that's going to happen with a lot of these old retail guys if they're gonna they're gonna redevelop into something else because retail, frankly, your you know, your phone has changed that that the fact that everything's done online now, and if you want to go shop for something, you don't need a storefront to go do that. So that that that helped that. But dolphin's been, you know, it helped very true because it was also an entertainment concept. It was really meant to compete against sawgrass.

SPEAKER_02 40:01

Oh, yeah. Have you been to the Dolphin mall lately?

SPEAKER_00 40:04

It's been years.

SPEAKER_02 40:04

I I went there and I'll tell you, it is a cultural experience. Yes, it is, and and it's it's it's as Miami as it gets. I remember that. I I was like, holy shit, like this is you know, this is the real Miami right here. It is a melting pot. It's a fucking melting pot. And it's like I was you know, I just I was it was just so like it was so Miami in so many ways. Um, that uh, you know, I really if you want to see the real Miami, go to the dolphin mall.

SPEAKER_00 40:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:34

But it it's not it's not really an outlet mall anymore.

SPEAKER_00 40:36

I mean, now it has outlets, but it's it's diversified. It's a it's a real mall. It started off with 100% in Aleman, but it's now got a lot more entertainment and and food and beverage and something like that. That that that has evolved because obviously the the the business of retail has evolved.

SPEAKER_02 40:50

Yeah. And so you you you start working for Armando um at what phase of of the Dolphin Ball project?

SPEAKER_00 41:00

Very beginning. Very beginning. We were yeah, we were doing the DRI. So we had filed it, we were going through the hearings, uh, and then we went through the whole development of it, and the mall opened up, I think, in 2001 was when the mall opened up. So four years after you Yeah, well, it took us it took us a year and change to go through that DRI process. So the DRI process is basically zoning on steroids, uh-huh, is how I describe it. Because you review everything at a very larger scale. That's how you get to pay for an interchange. You have to do all these massive things because the impact is so great that you have to be able to do that. And remember, it was Dauphin Mall to the south, but to the north was another three million square feet of industrial, which was Beacon Tradeport. Armando wasn't in it for them all. Swerdler was in it for them all. There were partners on it, which were they ended up, you know, and and full credit to those guys, they were masters of figuring out what the next step is. So we get the approvals, the entitlements, everything else, and they got a partner to buy it right off after we uh we to buy them all. Yeah, Talman uh centers, which is uh the owner, the current owner of the mall, bought them all back then. They were large uh retail reet, uh I forgot where they are out of, but they uh they came and they bought them the mall, right? Upon CO, they had their they began to so we were out. And so we focused on the industrial to the north, which is at the time, if uh and you know, you know, if you guys remember during this time, but everybody was competing to where the nap of the Americas was going to be. And it was about the telecom time. This was now in the early 2000s. Everybody wanted to where's fiber located and data. Remember, this was pre-all the internet stuff. People were starting to get into that craze of data centers. Not data centers as are known today. Data centers today are like these monster uh buildings that that effectively are sucking in a lot of energy and and and water and stuff like that. Back then it was just a building that was a category five and can hold basically data storage. Yeah, that's really so we sold uh a bunch of that to international companies that were looking to come in here, Spaniards and European companies that were investing to to put these data centers. So we put a bunch of data centers, but logistics was still the the uh the major business because of the proximity to the airport and the seaport. And what was your job description at this time? You're still with Codena, right? I'm still with Cadena, and but I was just a project manager. I was, you know, literally literally a consultant doing uh the entitlement work. So my business was the pre-development and entitlement work. Got it. And I really focused on that, and in my career, I really became a specialist in that.

SPEAKER_01 43:36

So it's like a lawyer, like it's like a land use attorney, basically.

SPEAKER_00 43:38

It's like a land use attorney. Did you ever want to become a lawyer? I did, and uh then I went to my five year high school reunion, everybody was a lawyer. And they were like, Okay, I take I'm not gonna become a lawyer. I don't want to be a lawyer anymore. I want to be something else because they were telling me how horrible it is billing and this and that. I'm like, okay, that's not for me, guys. Yeah. So I ended up, you know, obviously, but I love the law. I love how it is and and I love, you know. Being able to debate the the uh the merits of a project and things like that. So it's a lot of fun to see a project through when they give you a problem, you try to say, okay, how do we fix this? Or sometimes fixing it is getting really, really creative how to do it.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

It's really interesting. Did you get a lot of exposure to other sides of the business while you were working there?

SPEAKER_00 44:19

I did. So I because you're part of a team, Armando, you know, he he was smart because he made us all, we were all individual business units. So we had our own uh PL, and so we we basically had to make enough money to pay our salaries and then put some back to the mothership, just like brokers. When you guys see somebody, you know, the housekeeps a piece of it, that's how it worked. But at the time when we had a project, everybody came together. So development guys, we had our own construction company, and we had on brokerage, property management, and then we were the pre-development guys. So we all came together to do the projects, and that's where I learned because we would help brokers, for example, would say, Hey, I have a tenant who's moving into here and they got a problem with Durham. Co Jose G. And Jose G would go there and I would fix all the stuff, and and that's how I learned, but it was charging that division my fees. Oh I did that as well. Yeah, and so we did we I had my own uh colleagues were my clients at times, and Armando made us be competitive with each other, but at the same time also come together for our projects and and and put together our our heads to to fix things together.

SPEAKER_01 45:27

That's really interesting, makes sense. So, how long were you with Codena?

SPEAKER_00 45:33

Uh well it's funny because Cadena evolved. So Kadena gets purchased in uh 2006. Uh Armando had always been after the railroad. He had a fascination with particularly their their assets, right? Because he knew uh, if you remember FEC was at one point owned by St. Joe, St. Joe's company, St. Joe Paper.

SPEAKER_02 45:52

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:53

Largest landowner in the state of Florida. State of Florida, that's right. So Armando's figuring out a way of getting together with them because he's a developer. And what do developers love? Land. We want to have enough opportunities to create a pipeline of development. And so Armando, through his network of friends and and and people he did business with, uh, ended up uh selling a piece of the company to St. Joe. And that's how we ended up uh doing our project, which is Flagger Station. You guys know the Flagger Station asset, right?

SPEAKER_03 46:22

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 46:22

So Flagger Station we named it Beacon Station back then because Armando loved everything the name Beacon as a tribute to the Beacon uh Council. Oh, okay. That's how the Beacon names come come uh interesting. He he loved uh the purpose of the business development side of the Beacon Council, so he ended up uh having the Beacon brand. Um and uh we team up with them uh and Armando sells uh a piece of it. It didn't end up working because a Duke, I don't know if you remember Duke or they're still around, was also part of that whole deal. He sold a third, a third, a third, and and ends up um, you know, he can't have too many masters. So he buys himself back uh the company. Armando does. Armando does. And then in 2006, it was up, you know, the railroad had already split from St. Joe. FEC went public. Uh at the time, Adolfo Enriquez, who works with Related Now, was the uh the chairman of the board of directors for Florida East Coast Railway or Florida East Coast Industries, which was the parent company of the uh railway, and uh says, Hey Adolfo, uh you guys have a lot of assets, great railroad, but you don't have a really good real estate team. How do how about we get together? Because we had seen all the assets when we were part of them. And so we knew that there was a lot of potential, but not enough talent to exploit that potential. And so we end up uh uh he ends up selling the Cadena group as a whole to uh Florida East Coast Industries, but in typical Armando fashion, he takes a lot of his uh proceeds in shares and becomes a majority shareholder in the Florida East Coast Industries. So he becomes controlling uh entity of Florida East Coast Industries and then helps reset the board. Uh he's president of a company, uh Dolph is CEO of it, and uh we end up you know taking it from being a publicly traded company, they they go shop it around and they meet Fortress Investment Group.

SPEAKER_02 48:18

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 48:19

And that's in 2007. So we were bought at $42 a share. A year later, we were we were we were sold at $84 a share. At how much? 84. So we doubled our money in one year, which was fantastic. So Fortress buys for a guy like me, because when I took my my equity part of it, I took it in the same. Warm Armando said he's taking the shares, I said, I'll take any shares because I know anybody knew something that I didn't know. And it ended up being a great decision. Um, and then Florida East Coast Industries uh became it was a parent company of the railroad. Armando stayed, that was 2007 when Fortress bought us, and then typical private equity, they look at where do we maximize value. So we restructured a bunch of the company, put the real estate in certain holdings, and then uh the rail side and the other side.

SPEAKER_02 49:05

And let's talk about the rail a little bit. Like what what what rail lines do they own?

SPEAKER_00 49:10

So the Florida East Coast Industries Railroad is the original lines that Henry Flagler developed. Yep. So Mr. Flagler, uh, who was the visionary that brought us the train all the way to Key West, uh, when he was doing his railroad in the late 1800s, and I don't know if you read a book, uh, Last Trains of Paradise. I have read that. It's a great book. Great book, and it gives you a lot of context for those who who know about Florida history because it talks about who Chrome was. Chrome was a surveyor for for uh Flagler and why Chrome Avenue is Chrome Avenue, because that was the alignment that he actually thought the railroad should go through further inland, but it was ended up being on the ridge, yeah, the Cutler Ridge. Because it was the higher ground. The higher ground. Yeah. So a Flagner took it down the higher ground, that's why it goes down US one. Yeah, and so that asset, right, you know, from the old rail lines down that way, they sold to DOT. Because remember, uh when the railroad stops uh uh running in after the hurricane, the 1934 hurricane, uh, and then uh it stops to Key West, but then it actually during the 60s, there was a whole and there was passenger train stop because of a whole uh protest that they had with with uh the unions and stuff like that, and they end up shutting down passenger operation and stuck to cargo in the 60s. Yep. So they never wanted to have passengers again.

SPEAKER_02 50:28

So so the rail line runs basically from Jacksonville all the way to Miami.

SPEAKER_00 50:32

It's a short line railroad and it runs from Jacksonville to down right here where we are. Yeah. That's the last stop here at the port of Miami. So that's really the only piece of rail that the that the the current company holds. It holds all the way from Port Miami all the way up to Jacksonville, and then some stuff out west near the airport where they have the rail yard. Okay. That's their hub here in Miami where they actually transload and and move goods. That's why everybody, that's why West Date is what West Date is, because and Durral became what Durral is because of the industrial market that brought all those goods and certainly.

SPEAKER_02 51:01

But it's a massive rail yard in East Hialea. It's like in the center of East Hyalea. It is, it's right next to the airport.

SPEAKER_00 51:06

Yeah. And in fact, you know, one of the things Ramond always looked at is remember we used to park cars right by 36th Street. Yeah, an open lot. But that was not the best efficient way. And then when the car business changed, if you remember when the car makers had that problem in 2008, uh, they stopped. People used to be forced to send cars and keep a thousand cars in inventory. And then dealers would pull cars if they needed them. Well, that was changed when there was a whole issue with the American car manufacturers back then. So they stopped, you know, warehousing cars. And so what they ended up we looked at and said we have empty parking lots, and why don't we put warehouses on them? That's what South Florida Logistics Center, which we developed on the south side of the rail yard. And you guys developed that in the two in the uh Yeah, we developed that in between the late 2000s and the early 2010 era. I think we finished the last buildings in the mid-2015 around there. Uh, but great product where it, you know, we were able to develop a bunch of of warehouses, you know, in a tight area, but we also learned that uh railroads do a lot of contamination. So you learned what I mean. We we we dug that first hole for for the first building, and then this black oil comes out of there. And it's not the good kind, it's the it's the one you don't want to deal with because you ended up having a whole contaminated site. So we were able to do a lot of cleaning up and we learned again, I learned a lot of a lot from where was that contamination coming from? For just fuel? Well, you know, back this because the railroad goes back to the 1800s. Yes. Back then, if you wanted to dump oil, you just dump it on the ground, hole in the ground and tossed it out. Yeah, that's where it got a little dicey. But we learned that, and by the way, that wasn't only here, that was throughout the state of Florida. I developed some stuff in in uh Jacksonville and in uh St. John's County that had the same problems, but it was it was it's one of those um uh uh uh types of lessons you learn from railroads that you say, okay, how do we do this the right way and make sure we because again, railroads they were federally preempted by a lot of things. They they they follow a different rule. Their laws date back to the Abraham Lincoln days, guys. I mean, they can do whatever the fuck they have the power of eminent domain. Yeah. Oh, really? And they do. So that's the only thing I didn't know that apart from government, the only other entity that has the power of eminent domain are railroads because it was granted by the federal government because when they were doing the transcontinental railroad, they needed to take your property, they took it. Yeah, they have to compensate you for it, but they took it. And that's the same thing when Flagler was doing it, he was doing his alignment. You know, people were trying to see where he was gonna go so that they can, you know, put their property in front of it and see if they get paid more money.

SPEAKER_03 53:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:34

And so uh it's been interesting. The same thing when we did Brightline, people were saying which way are they gonna go so that they can see how they can sell their properties to us. And we ended up figuring it out, and we we ended up doing a deal with uh the state of Florida instead of having to go off and buy private land. But even that, we it was an experience, especially like when we bought the station sites, right? Because Fort Lorda, we didn't have a state we had a station set. We had to buy the stuff down there, and we had to use if we said it was gonna be all about Florida or and at the time was the name. Uh, people were gonna say, okay, the cost is this much higher. Yeah. Right. So we had to be a little quiet. So we had a we had a a broker that had nothing to do with us.

SPEAKER_02 54:10

So you guys own the railroad line, but but but you guys owned significant amount of land in downtown Miami. We did. And and but did you guys own very much land besides that around? None. None. None.

SPEAKER_00 54:22

We own none. So both uh Fort Lauderdale and uh and uh West Palm Beach were acquired afterwards, and that was the the dance we had to do is make sure we acquired it without half the world knowing we acquired it.

SPEAKER_02 54:34

And so you were you were involved in that process of acquiring that.

SPEAKER_00 54:36

Yeah, so by that time I was already a little more senior and knowing what I you know what I know today. And and so uh I was the lead to to help that entitlement process, which is a total different process because we've talked about DRIs, right? For for our regular zoning stuff here, railroads use the federal side, which is NEPA. And NEPA is basically it's the same type of of uh process you would go through of entitlement, but at a federal level and and at a very more detailed level, because you get into all of the environmental, it's all about environmental. So it's about when you have 36 bridges you're crossing and you have to develop all those, and you're going through eight counties and you have to deal with eight different people. So you're you're having to do a lot of legwork and also making sure you don't displace people with your project because that's all part of that balancing act. And and and overtown was very sour because of I-95. Yeah, if you remember the stories of 95, what it did to Overtown. I mean, they just they just built it on top of one when I came into the overtown community as you know, this young Cuban guy trying to do a railroad, they were like, what are you gonna do to flashbacks? What are you gonna do in neighborhood? That's why Brightland is elevated. Oh it was elevated because if we would have put Bright Line on the ground, imagine what we've done to Overtown. Yeah, and now here's another barrier to people being able to connect to communities. So it was very important to do that right from the beginning. And so we learned that by coming out and meeting with all the neighbors from Overtown. And again, it was it it took it took a lot to have them have faith in us. And I really have a a real uh good spot in my heart for for the people of Overtown because they really embraced us and the concept to where the point that they, you know, I think they've seen the good benefits of it. And I tell you, a lot of people that live in this area work for Brightland.

SPEAKER_02 56:29

So we're basically in overtown right now. You are in overtown. Yeah, you are, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:32

This is an overtown.

SPEAKER_02 56:33

Um, let me ask you a question though. So you when is the the the idea of all aboard Florida floated? That's interesting. So we were it was uh and how and who came up with the idea?

SPEAKER_00 56:47

It it actually I give full credit to Wes Edens, who is the he's a chairman of Fortress, because if you Well, he's not here, you can take credit if you want.

SPEAKER_01 56:56

Yeah, I won't take it.

SPEAKER_00 56:57

Yeah, he's he's not a bad dude, he's a good guy. He's he knows a very brilliant guy as well. Where does Wes live? Wes lives up in New York. Okay, New Yorker. New York. Besides that, we like him.

SPEAKER_02 57:06

We'd love to shit on New Yorkers. I'm in New York, but we like to shit on New Yorkers too.

SPEAKER_01 57:09

Yeah, all the dorks that came down post-COVID.

SPEAKER_02 57:11

Raising our real estate price. Yeah, thank you, New York. Yeah, yes.

SPEAKER_00 57:15

So so Wes, uh, we're sitting around uh a conference room table talking about various things. We weren't really talking about passenger rail, but if you remember at the time Rick Scott was governor and there was a project, the railroad. What year is this? This is 2011. Uh Rick Scott is governor. Uh, Armando had left the company already. This is he left in 2010. He had a three-year tail to his to him selling the company. And then he opened up Kadena Partners, which you know, finished doing downtown Dural. I worked on downtown Durral at the beginning of it, but then you know, Armando finished it off with his family office. And uh, and so during that time, uh Rick Scott was doing a project between Tampa and Orlando. Remember this, the high speed rail between Tampa and Orlando. I don't know if you guys remember that during that time. But uh Obama was going to give uh Florida $2.1 billion. And uh basically Rick Scott said, no, thank you. If it doesn't come with maintenance, and he knew what he was saying because the federal government gives you money to build stuff, not to maintain stuff. Yeah. So if you want to. And the maintenance costs are really where the expenses that's where the big expenses, the operational and maintenance costs are exorbitant and railroads because frankly, in the whole country, there's not a railroad or transit system that makes money, right? Even the best transit system in the country, which is New York, they don't make money. They don't make money, they don't operate at a lot. You know, uh there's mass transit is not a money-making uh business. And so this was really uh the Acela, which is the closest thing to it, still loses money. Yeah, right. As a whole, it's the only part of the business that actually makes money for Amtrak, but the rest of the lines don't make money. But it's a public system because that's when the the Amtrak starts when all those railroads I told you in the 60s went on strike, and there was a whole bunch of issues with the unions, and that's how Amtrak gets birth, is in the early 70s because of those strikes, because they were private railroads before, yeah, but then they all shut down and the government centralized them and put them all under that. The biggest difference is Amtrak runs on other people's tracks, they don't own the tracks. The government doesn't own the tracks. They they get trackage rights because of the federal uh because the laws they passed, they basically you can't stop them from from from uh operating your railroad. So uh Wes says, and it's all publicated, so he basically you know thumbs his nose at Obama and says, You take your money back, I don't want it. Wes says, Okay, how do we get those $2.1 billion and we build the railroad? And so that's how the conversation starts around the conference room table. And so we end up hiring some professionals, they do a study, and in um early uh 2012, we announced that we're gonna do all abort Florida, which is an effort to bring rail from Miami to Orlando and then go to Tampa eventually, right? And then the third phase we're going to judge.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:02

And there's a piece there that's not there's no rail yet, which is the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:06

The piece from Coco to Orlando doesn't exist. Exactly. And so, but that wasn't the alignment. We didn't know what the alignment was at the time. It could have been from West Palm to Orlando, it could have been different alignments and connections. That's where we were trying to study at the time and understand what would be the most efficient, cost-effective way of doing it. And that's where the birth of Olive Board Florida and Brightline start, and we start talking about, you know, how do we, you know, uh create this synergy and this opportunity to have a railroad that actually makes money, right? And I think, you know, looking back at it, uh, you know, if we would have stuck with our original uh uh the way, and I think this is the way of the world because things changed. And we were, you know, Brightland was a victim of the circumstance of COVID, rising construction costs, everything was really, you know, it put them, it was a three billion dollar project that turned into a six billion dollar project, uh, as at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:57

And that's where to uh up to upgrade the the existing rail and then also to buy the trains, the stations, everything was supposed to be a three billion dollar project. And then and then the the the how about did they have to acquire the right-of-way between Coco and Orlando?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:14

And we we ended up doing a deal with uh the state of Florida because there's a a State Road 528 that is a right of way that goes from Coco right into uh right by Orlando right into the airport. And so we ended up leasing a piece of that road from Which is about 40 miles, right? It's about 40 miles from uh from uh Cocoa into Orlando, and then uh the rest of the right-of-way from uh Orlando into Tampa, we have sort of a deal with with EFTA to run along the I-4 corridor. Gotcha. And so that's the piece is done hold now, and they're they're looking at how they're gonna connect the rest of the park. So they're now in the in a point where they're figuring out, you know, and I wish them the best of luck in this, is they got to talk to their all their bondholders and say, okay, how do we get this under control? Because nobody wants them to go away. It's a great product. In fact, as people got used at first, people were like, Why would I take a train? And you know, but the minute they ride it, I don't know if you guys have ridden Bright Lines, it's amazing, but it the experience is phenomenal. They've done such a great job because unlike other railroads that were just treated as transportation, they treated it as hospitality. Yeah, it's a and it's an experience, it's not about just the train ride, it's about the whole experience to the point that I mean the people we end up hiring, because so we we um we're we're developers, but we never developed the railroad in our life. Yeah, we nobody had in a long time. So we say, okay, where are the the guys that know about this stuff? And so we end up uh traveling to Denver and we meet a gentleman by the name of Mike Reiniger. Uh now Mike is he he we we he was working for Acom at the time. And he became the president, right? And he became the president and he's a CEO now of that uh that company. Uh out West is doing the the biggest to LA uh Brightland West. But Mike was a former Disney guy, and he knew about hospitality. It wasn't just uh he's an architect by training, so he had a creative uh side to it, and but he also knew that the experience, and that's again the Disney is you know the the cream of the crop when it comes to hospitality and experience, he ends up uh bringing in that culture to to the Brightline team and giving that mindset, like this is about the customer experience to the point that if you walk into the Brightline station, the fragrances that are in the air, yeah, you smell the same thing at the in the train. It's it's like it's it's a mental they're there it's a they're they're they're gonna be able to do that. I notice the fragrance.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:35

Have you noticed the fragrance? Of course, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:37

Slap in the face the second those doors open. So that's good though. But that gives you that, okay. I'm in a place that I like. You know, it's sort of a it's a psychological thing. But apart from that, the stations have to be clean, everything has to be up to date. As opposed to an Amtrak station. Like I've I took when I took my son to see colleges when he went to Boston College, I said, let's do it by train. Being practicing what I preach.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:59

Listen, I I love that. I really do. This is what I preach, I swear this is the trick. But you'll probably never do it again, right? Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:06

But at the time it sounded like a great idea. Yeah. And so that's awesome. So you guys rode from here up to Boston? No, we flew to Richmond, Virginia. His first uh college that he wanted to look at was the University of Richmond in uh Richmond, Virginia. And so we started there. They had an Amtrak station. So we we saw the university. We we took we took the train from there from Virginia into DC. We went to Georgetown, we saw all the schools there, took it to Philly, saw the schools there, and then took it to New York, saw the schools there, and then took it to Boston, saw the schools there. Longest train rides of my life. Yeah, plus I I like I wanted to see what the Amtrak system was like. I love that. And I said, Oh my god, and we are so blessed.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:45

This is this is what we we should not do, right? This was the donce of railroading.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:50

And it's because it's it's a it's a it's not treated as a customer experience. Yeah. I mean, they don't even there's no air conditioning in some of the stations. You're sitting on a on a block uh of concrete as your seat. It's it's not conducive to welcoming people. And you see the people around are all just miserable. Yeah, you go to Brightland, people are happy, they're at the bar, they're they're getting a drink, they're eating, if they're in the if they're in the lounge, they're relaxing, they got Wi-Fi. All that is what we we learned from it. And the same way we went on a tour around the world to see trains, what kind of trains, which trains are the best ones for this, you know, what type of technology? You have all these sorts of interesting things. How fast can this go, right? Yeah, so there's a lot of learning and that's saying from a real estate guy, it was for me, it was I was a kid in a candy store. I loved getting that information and understanding how you translate that into the real estate side of it, and how does it relate into a building? Yeah, and and what it is today, the station, because we could have just built a station without anything else above it. But the goal was to really create this, you know, central station that was a place where people are going to come, but people can live there, work there, you know, play there, and that's sort of. Of thing has now become a fabric of our community because I see people now in Brightline today. If you've been around this neighborhood, Brightland at first was like we were like almost giving it away for people to come try it and try it and try it. And then people tried it once they tried it once. And then after COVID, I think it really took off. So so Brightline launches what year?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:18

Or it launches as all aboard, or is it launches at Bright Light?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:22

It launches at Brightland. In fact, we that's well, what wasn't why would why the name switch? So All Aboard Florida was the effort, right? It was like getting it's like a campaign. Yeah, it's kind of like the getting people like excited. All aboard Florida, get everybody aboard, right? That was the name of it. And then the marketing guy said, You can't call it All Abort Florida because if some German guy comes in here, he's gonna go all aboard, you can't pronounce All Aboard Florida. So then we had to figure out what the right name was. And I remember my youngest at the time, you know, we had all sorts of names. We had the one of the names was Expresso, yeah. The Cuban thing. And they wanted to name it, Brightland could have been named Expresso for for a but we had like a focus group and a bunch of stuff, and then Brightland was the name that came out of it. But I remember my youngest son says, we told him, Hey, we picked the name's Brightland. He goes, Is that a toothpaste? And I'm like, I said, Oh my gosh, we didn't think about that. And I'm like, Don't tell anybody that we we'll keep that to ourselves. So but it ends up that that they out of out of marketing research, that was something that that was easy because it's the sun, it's you know, it's it's sort of that concept of Florida and the sun. Do you think about that?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:25

So um Brightline initially starts with it announces it's gonna have a station in Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm, and then Miami. Yep. Miami gets built first, right? Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and West Palm all get built first. At the same time. And and and does and Brightline gets a chunk of change. Um and again, Fortress is the owner of Brightline. Yes. They get a chunk, so Fortress gets a chunk of change from the government. No, they don't. So one of the things what happened to that $2.3 billion?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:01

That's what we learned in the process is like money doesn't come for free, it comes with strings.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:06

So if you took government money, you have to follow certain government rules. And those are very onerous on a private business. And so we learned early on that we couldn't do it with government money. So we had to do it without the government funding for the for that initial piece, because if not, we wouldn't, you know, we were saying it would be the country's first privately owned and operated railroad. That was our tagline, which it still is. And uh and so what they did is they went Un until now. Well, they've taken they've taken the money for safety improvements. They never taken it for operations or they haven't taken it for any of the expansions in capital. Because what they've done is they still kept that. They they've invested in that. Now, what you're hearing now is about the commuter rail. And I'll get back to that in a second. The commuter rail was always in the background because when we before Brightland existed, we almost sold the whole thing to the state of Florida.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:56

Oh, yeah?

SPEAKER_00 1:08:57

Yeah. So uh Rick's got a well, Charlie Christ is uh was governor at the time, and Charlie's um chief of staff and and uh DOT director, DOT secretary comes to see us. Uh, this is uh what years? Probably around 2008, 2009, around there, before the the bubble burst. And uh he says, We we want to, you know, we want to do the east coast corridor. And this was something that's being studied since the 80s. So when when when tri-rail happened, tri-rail is in CSX because FEC did not want tri rail, but the government always wanted the the passenger stuff to be on where people live. Yeah, downtown. That's where the density is. If you look at the density, it's all through the FEC corridor. So having done that, FEC basically says, you know, I don't want to deal with passengers. I hate passenger rail. Because they're just moving cargo. That's in the 80s. Remember, this they had that bad taste from the 60s. Same group were like, we're not doing this again. And so they pushed off the government to not, and remember that there's two entities that have eminent domain can't, they couldn't take it from the railroad. The government could not seize it from the railroad because they have, under law, they have the same powers of eminent domain. So therefore, like they had to negotiate with with the the railroad. So they ended up going to uh CSX, that was the competitor of FEC, but FEC, when it comes to short haul, kicked their butt. And and no, the long haul is CSX. They're the ones that take you all the way to wherever you want to go outside the state of Florida.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:24

But in Florida, you're talking about long haul passenger or or cargo, cargo cargo.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:29

So long haul cargo, CSX, short haul is this. So they had more capacity because they had trains that were going you know past Florida, yeah, and not just within Florida. Our trains were just within Florida, so therefore it it needed the capacity, so they didn't want to have any interruptions. But here we are, we own the real estate and the the the pass the uh uh freight and railroad, and you know, private equity looking at maybe this is an asset we want to sell. They come to see us. They wanted to pay us at the time one point something billion dollars for the entire system, right? And uh, and these guys were like, just think about it, because they paid three billion dollars who wanted to pay that the government. The government, the state, the state could have had the whole system for 1.1 billion because Fortress had had paid three billion for the whole company, including the right-of-way. So they're like, hey, a third just in selling them the right-of-way. Hell, that's a great day.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:23

Um but these guys held out and said, you know what, it may not be the right thing. And then one thing led to the other, Charlie Chris leaves as governor, the thing fizzles, and then Rick Scott takes over. Uh, he doesn't care for railroads uh at the time. He had just had the fight with Obama, and and so it was it was not, it wasn't gonna happen where commuter rail on the FEC could happen. It happened with uh CSX with Tri-Rail, right? But Tri-Rail's in the wrong spot. Yeah, Trirail's too far west, it's not it doesn't go through the dense areas, it goes through a lot of industrial areas. So it wasn't never took off like that. People used it because it eventually took them to the right places.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:00

But one of the things when we were doing Brightline because TriRail was just it would end up somewhere, it would end up by the airport. Yeah, by the airport. Correct. So it never got to downtown.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:08

Yeah, so one of the ideas that we had when we were doing Brightline is like, why don't we connect the tri rail to downtown? And we solved this whole problem about the government wanting to serve the downtown. So we created this eight-mile connection from the what's the it's called the iris, where where CSX and FEC meet and allows the tri-rail to cross over into our lines right by around uh 74th Street, more or less, uh in um in the high lee area there. They come this way and they cut across and they come down this way. So tri rail today comes to Bright Line to the station because that was it was an afterthought, by the way. The station was under construction. That station was under construction when we put in tri rail. Because it was like, imagine in the middle of the night, you're like building something, and somebody says, Hey, I want to add another two tracks here, another train service. We're like, okay. In the middle of that, we redid all the plans and everything else and got it done. Uh, and that's where that's where government money was given. But Brightline gave the real estate. So we gave them the actual real estate where they sit today for free. You gave which real estate? The real estate where the tracks sit up in the above the ground. Okay, yeah. Triro sits in that station for free because every a lot of partners came together to fund it, including Brightline at the time. So that's where the commuter rail idea continued. And then recently they reactivated, like, hey, why don't we have two systems? Because a network of trains is better than just a single line of trains. So having Triro come here, but maybe also go up to Aventura and eventually go up the East Coast to the other cities, and having uh them have two different systems, maybe like an express and one, the other, has always been the vision. And so that's where we've been talking about it from meanwhile, sharing the tracks with freight, with cargo, sharing the tracks with freight, Brightline, and Trira. And there's enough capacity. There is the interesting thing, there's enough capacity. You can put about 60 trains a day on that track, and and we right now are under 50 trains a day.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:06

60 trains a day, including uh passenger and freight.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:11

I don't know if the drivers of Miami can handle that. That may be the different issue, but because they love just smoking people. There's uh there's an Instagram page I follow. I think it's in Florida's or is it Brightline track?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:23

Brightline track.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:24

He just posts he paste he posts the same meme every time Brightline hits someone, it just says Brightline just hit another fucking person. Yeah, and he's got like row 70 posts.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:34

It's interesting because that the day we opened Brightline, uh, it's like, you know, this is a great day. Everybody's like excited. This is like I think it's 2017 when we opened it up, uh, officially to West Palm. Big ceremony down here, first train coming out of there. Um, there's a lady of the night in Pompano Beach. Ben's favorite, who is who is walking her John across the tracks, and people weren't expecting this type of train. So they see the light, you know, coming. She's walking in high heels across the way and goes across with him. He makes it, but she's in high heels. She doesn't. She gets wiped out by Brightland. First day, first death. Well, I mean, listen, it should have been a sign. Look, it's we're not ready. Well, it's it's no secret. It's got the nickname of Delius Train in the United States. It's it actually it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:29

Is that the Miami behavior? People just don't take it seriously. It is.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:32

And I'll tell you because the train, if you've ever been inside the train cab, it doesn't have a steering wheel. The train does not have a steering wheel, it can't turn. Trains go straight, right? Of course. So the train never went off the tracks and chased somebody down the street and killed them. Somebody went into the corridor and caused that. And look, a lot of times, and I say it, is there's a lot of mental illness. There's a lot of suicides, right? There's majority of the accidents are not accidents, they're done on purpose because people and and by the way, it happens Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, really, Father's Day weekend. When people are depressed because of life, they uh resort to to that. That's that. And it happened with Tri-Rail. It's it used to happen, but because you know, we're the quicker option, yeah. They they uh decided not to, you know, now that's becomes that it's gotten better in the years as people's behavior changes, but we still have people who jump on the track.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:24

The day one hit is the sign right there. That's like this is gonna be this is gonna be a long road. It's gonna be a long road.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:29

But there there's I mean, listen, the reality is is like, you know, for you know, as long as the FECR has the the rail's been there, there's never been a train that fast. And then from from one day to the next, people are expecting cargo, then all of a sudden these trains are blazing through these intersections. How fast are they going?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:47

Well, the the the the the freight trains go about 45 miles an hour, 80 miles an hour. Yeah, so twice as fast. In Japan, they're doing 240. Yeah, but the Japanese people have a little bit more common sense than that.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:59

Well, there's there's also the fact that you know these are all at grade, right? Yeah, that's and so and and then it's like who's gonna pay for that, right? Because because the the railroad doesn't have to pay for it because they have they have the right of way. So is is government gonna step in and are they gonna improve safety and start building bridges and overpasses? That's a hell of an investment. That's a big investment.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:21

That's and that's one of the things that we've talked about is how do we prevent people from doing that? And that's one of the things is all these safety improvements. That's when the government starts stepping in and saying, Okay, we've got to do something because if now we've got to build overpasses. Yeah, so they started investing in the safety, in the the quad gates, the raise median. So we had people, we had a guy in a Corvette that went under the the arms. Yeah, like his car was so low proud, he just decided, I'm just gonna go. Yeah, and he went and there was a bad thing. It's a lot of stupidity, too.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:46

I've seen people like they they they pull out of the tracks, they get stuck under the tracks, and then the arm comes down behind them, and they're trying to back up, and they could just drive forward. Like there's no arm in front of them. No, they could just keep driving, but they see the train coming, they they lose their mind, and there's they bail and the car gets smoked, and yeah, it's there's been a lot of of a lot of stupid stupidity that happened around it.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:08

Yeah, but the reality is that people have made a lot of bad decisions, and you know, drivers in Miami, I don't have to just say that that's it. That's all you gotta say. It's it's the reality is that people were distracted, they they don't pay attention, they're starting to pay attention because I think people have seen the consequences.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:23

Everyone's following the bright line tracker, they don't really follow they don't want to be on the meme.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:27

I hate to say it, but all that all that bad stuff happened teaches people less. Some people never learn it, but a lot of people have, and those incidents have gone down dramatically. And so I'm I'm happy for them because I want to see them succeed. I've seen it go down because I've seen the the the bright line tracker. I haven't seen a post in a while.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:44

So no, no.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:45

And now what happens is rarely you know happens probably in the in the northern stretch where you got a random guy who just you know end up going around the tracks and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:52

But going to the beginning, like you we mentioned earlier that uh trains never really made a profit, they're not a profitable business. What what gave uh all these real estate guys the hubris to be like, we're gonna make this thing make money?

unknown 1:19:03

You know what?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:04

It's kind of like a buying an airline, it would work this time, I promise.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:08

Unless unless like I just read a couple weeks ago, like they have like a a hundred million dollar interest payment that's due, I think, like tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:16

And uh what the creative financing that that the private equity guys you know put together, that was the only reason it made sense to fund it. Because if you go to a regular financial institution and say, give me you know six billion dollars, and you know, these are all the projections that we think is gonna happen without any real basis because there's nothing to test. What do you test it against? Exactly. Like in the industrial market, you know where you know occupancy rates are because it's very easy. You can just look at the It's like building an apartment building in like the Everglades.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:43

It's like there's no comps, there's no but we prompt we we believe this is gonna work.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:47

And and that, and it was really a truthful belief that that Fortress and and Wes had that he can make this happen, he can make it work. Um and and look again, the world is Wes still the CEO of Fortress? He still is he still is the CEO of Fortress. Uh, because it's the private equity side. Fortress, uh the one that trades and then does the um uh investment side of it, they're they owned, they were owned by SoftBank. I don't know if they're owned by SoftBank anymore, but they sold a piece of the public traded side of Fortress. The PE side of Fortress was kept by by Wes and his partners, and they still do a lot of loans. And they still own Brightline, they still own the funds that that own Brightline. Gotcha. They own and manage those funds. And and there's a lot of investors. Again, there's a lot of investment companies, and there's a lot of people that that are rooting for it to get. And let me tell you that the the ridership has gone up. Yeah, you look at it, you know, year over year the ridership keeps going up. It's just not enough to cover your debt service. And that's where it they're trying to figure out how they restructure that stuff, and they're in the middle of it. And you know, knock on wood, these guys are gonna get their their act together with the the bondholders and and hopefully keep this asset around because it's again it's it's now become a community asset. People see it as that.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:55

Yeah, but I mean, this is it trains don't make money, you know. So I keep going back to that.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:02

So like it's they would they would if they can actually cover the debt service. But why can't they cover the debt service in that charge? Too much debt.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:11

Yeah, and the problem is people won't pay enough. You can't charge enough. They can't charge. Yeah. I mean, I just looked the ticket to Orlando next Thursday is 60 bucks one way. Yeah, which is about probably what my gas would be. Yeah, and so it's kind of like uh do I just drive and pay for the gas?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:22

Or you know, that decision point, a lot of people, you're probably thinking about it yourself. Most people now, once they take it once, they're like, I'm not driving again. Yeah, because it does it only takes you one time. And I and I hear it from from friends and and and people who have written it, it's like, hey, I'm never driving again to rely on. And and especially if you're in the in a lawyer, an engineer, you're doing it for business, because that's a lot of the users are business users. They're thinking about it like, hey, I can work all the way up there. I can be on conference calls, I can be on Teams calls because they have the Starlink on on the trains, Wi-Fi is phenomenal. You can stream movies, you can do that. And if you're a family of four, you're on vacation, you're like, hey, screw it, it's pay for the trains, it's no big deal. But it's how much can you be paying, right? And that's the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:03

It's it's well, they're competing with the airline, they are right. Like that's uh I remember reading an article early on that they're they were looking at okay, where if that especially the Orlando to Miami route, the competition is the airline.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:17

It was the airline, and the airlines got wise to it as well because they also say, you know, but we don't want to compete against Brightline. That's not where we make money. They would just have that leg because, for example, American Airlines was stopping in Miami because it was going down to Chile. Yeah, so it was going to Orlando, Miami, and heading back to South America. And they we were just a stop. So people would take that, but that's not every hour of the hour. These guys had hourly service, which made it a lot more enticing for people to say, you know what, I can take Bright Line for business because I had that flexibility that if I my meeting finished early, I can get back on the next train and and get out of there. So it made it makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. It's not for everybody. Like there's people that don't like to fly. This is great. I have a friend that he's totally afraid to fly and he takes a train all the time because he prefers that than driving. And, you know, so it it there's a there's a niche for it. Uh, but I think they got to figure out the debt service side of it before they actually start being a profitable business.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:09

But I mean, they literally have, I think, a a debt service payment of $150 million on June 25th. And like in a few days.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:18

So they're they're gonna they're gonna have to figure that stuff out with it's Brent Line's not gonna stop operating. No, now right now there's no plan for to and from what I've heard with them, they're gonna continue through operation. In fact, their their bondholders want them to continue operations because they're paying some of their Yeah, because what else do you do?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:33

How do you recoup that money? Yeah, what do you this is like a book out of um the power broker or you know a Trump move where you're like it's built, cost more than we thought it would. What do you guys want to do now? Yeah, like because taking it over isn't gonna cash you out. No, all we can do is keep operating and try to make more money.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:49

Yeah, and look, it it hopefully they figure out their financial, whether it's bringing in another equity partner or something like that, but they've they're gonna figure out their finances. I'm pretty confident that they're yeah, they got a lot of good guys that know that business better than anybody else that I've seen that'll actually figure out the financing side of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:07

And so in so you worked at the pri you worked on that project for a long time. I did. And then in 25, you is that when you went back to December of 20.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:17

Well, I was I was um in the middle of 24, I already was like, you know, I've done everything I need to do. All the real estate have been developed, County Line already was finishing up, right? We had done all the stuff at County Line. We sold it all to all industrial there. All industrial. That was a former landfill. That's a neat story, too.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:32

Yeah, let's talk about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:33

Yeah, that's how many acres of uh county line is 505 acres total. Uh, with the other land, uh the additional land we was about 640 acres, was the total square mile.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:42

And this was a landfill.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:44

Was it like a mountain of so this was uh going back to the Durell Mountains? Well, it it was actually more interesting than that. Going back to Hurricane Andrew. Oh, that's where they were throwing everything. So that's where it was all it was a C and D landfill. And that's C and D, I'm sorry. It's construction demolition debris, right? So after all the houses that got knocked down by the hurricane got demolished, it went there.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:05

All the asbestos went up there in typical, in typical Miami fashion.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:09

In typical Miami fashion, the guys who owned the landfill, uh with Hyalia guys, uh end up getting this permit for this landfill, started filling it, and it was like just take the money, take the money, take, take the landfill, you know, waste and everything else, but weren't really managing it.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:23

Don't ask any questions, what's coming in?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:25

Whatever goes in there, goes in there. And uh what ends up happening is uh they walk away from the landfill. Because normally landfills have a bond that guarantees it being closed. Those guys, because of during the emergency time or Hurricane Andrew, just like just go do it, right? And and they end up not having a financial assurance to close the landfill. Fast forward uh 2004, the property goes for sale uh and in bankruptcy court. Armando puts a bid on it. We were we we still were not with uh FECI. He starts negotiating back and forth. 2005, he starts having the conversation with Adolfo Enriquez about buying the company, and we had filed a DRI for County Line as well to bake an industrial park out of it. And we had looked at it and said it was no, it was we we bought we're buying it for pennies on the dollar uh because it was in bankruptcy because these guys had defaulted and everything. And so we got the dirt very, very cheap. Um, and then the biggest problem is we have an unclosed landfill that had all sorts of problems with Durham. Fortunately enough, I had hung out of Durham enough that I knew how to you know sort of figure that out, and the team we had had a lot of knowledge about to do it, and then we started uh you know inquiring more. We get bought in 2006, and and during the time from 2006 to when we really kick off uh County Line was 2012. It took six years to really plan it. And that time we visited New Jersey so many times.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:56

By the way, the the armpit of New York, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:59

The armpit of New York has the most redeveloped landfills in the country. Yeah. Wow. Yep, they had the most redeveloped landfills, and we learned how not to do it. Going back to the do's and don'ts, right? We went to these landfills and and you would see that they did the warehouse on pilings, right? But the whole parking lot was sinking because it was never compacted. So the material, the organic material started decomposing. Guess what happens? You start have uh settling in the parking lots. So we learned were they all like bumpy and shit? Like what? Well, it you can see it. You can see where where the warehouse meets the parking lot. There was a gap. But was the parking lot uniformly sinking, or was it just a disaster? Disaster. And so we learned a lot of the landfills were done wrong as redeveloped. Again, the older ones, the newer ones that did what's called dynamic compaction. And if you remember the Flintstones, right? Of course. If you remember Fred Flintstone what his job was to really raise a rock and slam it on the ground and break that, we had a guy that was like Fred Flintstone. He came in there, and there's a whole Plan called dynamic compaction where he takes these steel plates, raises them, and slams them down a bunch of times a day until you have the whole site. And this is and how big is this site? The the footprint of it was 505 acres.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:13

So they're just dropping steel on 550 acres of dirt. What a job.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:18

Started from 2012 and we just finished or finished the last year.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:21

Let me ask you a question though. This site, though, I mean, was it a landfill? Was it like was it like a mountain? It was all ununiform. Yeah. So it was So Did you have to remove a bunch of debris and put it somewhere else, or you were just compacting everything?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:34

That was what what we had to not do because if you took the material out of there, it would be a problem with Durham. As long as you kept it there and you can balance the site, right? So you had to make sure that material spread all over. And landfills have height limitations. The county had limited that landfill to 25 feet. There were parts of landfill without 70 feet. Oh wow. But they kept on taking material. So we had to spread that out. We fortunately got lucky that we never had to export any material out of there. In fact, we brought in fill on it. But if you look at county line, a lot of the buildings are up high. You go there, the road's here and the building's up there. So we were able to figure out that and then figure out the drainage because Durham doesn't allow you to drain through a contaminated site. Our whole site was contaminated with ammonia. So it took us some real creative engineering to figure out how to dispose of all the storm water and be able to still do it in an environmentally safe way, or we make it better. And that was, I mean, I tell you, that was one of my favorite projects because you took something that somebody said, this is totally worthless. Just dump it out. And we made something very valuable that it, you know, was close to a $2 billion project at the end of the day in value. And it got annexed to the city of Hyalea. And so it was it was a great opportunity for us to really show that you could do something differently, to the point that other people are now filling in lakes. So if you look at next to County Line, I don't know if you know about the I've heard about this. White Rock, and they're my clients. So I told you I left and now I have a bunch of clients, and the White Rock is one of my clients, and they own a 160-acre lake, that they're taking material and filling this 160-acre lake with lime rock, which is very valuable from across the lake belt. They're bringing it across here and filling it. And they're going to put about four million square feet of industrial there.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:25

Wow. What are they going to build? What kind of industrial?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:32

So they're doing prologes is doing it with them.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:34

Okay, so these are big warehouses.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:35

Yeah, these are typically from 200,000 up square feet up. Wow. Good good product. But that shows you still the demand in Miami.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:43

And when you worked on these big projects with uh you know doing all this stuff, all this entitlement work, were you ever exposed to the capital raising side of it? Was it all funded in-house? Like how were you?

SPEAKER_00 1:30:52

So I I worked on that mainly to the sales pitch, right? So I was part of the the the sales pitch side of it. Um I I got to meet a lot of bankers and stuff and investors along the way, but we were always part of the, we always did the the the pitch of it. We have guys that that had the relationships with the capital raise guys. Uh, and I always knew that having a capital partner was key. That's one of the things that learned. Or having your own money. Or having your own money. But if you don't have your own uh that side's money, you can go off and and get somebody who has the the capital to invest with you and always have uh a plan. So bring in somebody that doesn't have the talent to get it done, you have the talent, and then use that as your equity to get uh the guys who put up the money to make your partner in it.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:33

Yeah, that all sounds great on paper, but actually getting those guys to commit and do a deal is a whole other thing. It is a whole different thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:38

It's it's a lot, there's a lot of leap of faith, but your track record helps you. If you've done it before successfully and you've been able to figure it out, that's where people say, Okay, you know what? This guy's not just you know, put a hot air. They actually can point to something that they've done that gives you the ability and the comfort that, hey, if something goes wrong, they know how to fix it, right? Because everybody, I can tell you, all projects, nothing goes as planned. And the first site plan that we've ever done doesn't end up being the last site plan. It ends up uh evolving over the years, which is pretty cool because you see how you know the the projects evolve to the needs of the community. I I would have never thought that I was going to build a cold storage facility that was 300,000 square feet. That's right. And yet preferred freezer did something massive out there, right? So there's a lot of them. Uh you got CGI, the window guys out there, Boeing went out there. There's a bunch of guys that went out there that really this wasn't Dorot, right? This was a little bit of leap of faith. It didn't have the interchange yet. The roadway system out there is crappy. The, you know, we had uh a paid, uh investor in the county attempt to build 97th Avenue and 107th Avenue, and said, Oh, we're gonna do this so they can have the infrastructure ahead of the development. Well, they're now building 107th Avenue, and we built close to 12 million square feet out there, and yet the roads are not done. So sometimes teaming up with the government is not the best thing because you we we were hoping that the government could do it faster than us, and it ended up you know taking a couple of commissioners through there and and and nobody doing what they had to do. So you get creative and you figure all those solutions out.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:11

So in 25 you became the president of GLC Real Estate. What is that?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:15

So that's a it's my own company. I had um it's uh GLC stands Gonzalez and Beyond Cruz, my partner. Uh Maria, she worked with me. She used to be work at the county as well. She's a lawyer by training, so she and I came out and so you guys go back to the county days? So I knew her from the county days. I used to harass her because she used to be the chief of staff for uh uh back then commissioner Pepadias.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:36

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:37

So uh Maria uh knew me from the legislative side. So when we were starting up Brightline and doing that stuff, I I I I pulled her away from the commissioner's office and asked her to come work for me. And then she helped me stand up all these other projects with me. Come work for you when you were working for Brightline. And then and then when I left Brightline, I said, You want to come with me and do this? And she's like, you know what? What can you do? And what is it that you guys do? So what we our business has two sides of it now. So it's interesting. Going back to my roots is remember I told you I fix other people's problems. So that's the the side of my business that takes care of the payroll, right? That takes care of like the everyday needs. Because as you know, as a developer, you spend a lot of money before you make money, you invest a lot in in you know, entitlements and and getting everything ready before you actually can actually go get money, like pays your developer fee and get some money back into your pocket. So for in order to do that, I wanted to develop my own stuff. So I had a couple of deals that we had put together in the pipeline, but they were green enough that we're starting them off, but we needed to also have this business. So I had, again, when I said I'm leaving the railroad and and I'm going to go on my own and help, I was very fortunate. I had a lot of people that knew me, started calling me. Hey, I wanted to work with you. David Martin from Tarot is a client of mine, Prologes is a client of mine, Lenar is a client of mine, uh, VSRE, White Rock is a client of mine. So I have a book of clients that essentially have me on retainer to help them through all these things. And what I do is, you know, everybody has these large projects. I'm used to that large-scale projects. I'm used to dealing with that. So I represent a lot of folks, and like today at the county commission, we got another RTZ done in Brickle for Walter De Fortuna. You know, he's a uh he's in the he's got some properties. This is the one right next to the uh the Metro station, the financial district. The metro mover station, not the metro, but the metro mover station in the financial district by Brickle. He's we got him his entitlement there. He'll be able to develop now an office building and a residential building there. Uh and then, you know, we have various clients that call us for zoning stuff, environmental things, plats, stuff like that. So that helps us pay and keep the lights on. And then on the other side.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:46

So it's kind of like entitlement consulting.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:48

Yeah, it's basically that there's not too many, I don't think there's anybody that does like what I do particularly, uh, because I focus very much on the relationships I have with staff. It's not just political, it's a lot of the technical relationships that I've been developed over the years with working with folks at the county and understanding the problems and understanding how they think to be able to get to a yes. And so I help a lot of developers get unstuck. Um, at the same time, I'm using those dollars proceeds to invest in my own development that I was mentioning, the Palmetto Station. And that project started off uh with a good friend of mine, Alex Lastro.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:24

And Palmetto Station is the last station.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:27

The last station on the Metro of it's in Medley next to Durral. So it's right behind, you know, where Link Logistics built those warehouses there. Right behind there, there's a metro rail station there. Um, it was pretty much a sleepy metro rail station. Not a lot of people took it, mainly because it it's an open surface lot. So if you park there and it's raining, you're gonna get wet to go to the metro rail. If it's hot, it's you know, you don't want to leave your car there. So a lot of people were not entitled, enticed to go use it. So we said if we build a parking garage and 1,100 units, we can bring any.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:57

And this is on county land or no? On county land. So you have a land lease with the county?

SPEAKER_00 1:37:01

There's a process that the county uh created. Yes. So there's a process called the uh it's a section of code 8-4 where you can go to the county and say, I'm gonna propose it's almost like an unsolicited proposal. We went to them and said, we want to build this product here. And we went through a process, we were selected and we we uh we entitled it. We signed a lease with the county for a 90-year lease uh to develop these, and then we'll pay the county a rent, we'll build them a garage so now people can park under under under cover, not get wet, and increase ridership. But also what one of the things we did is we wanted to make sure that this was truly an affordable product. So the most expensive unit is at 120% AMI, and it goes all the way down to 60% AMI, unsubsidized. And so we made the numbers work, and we're focusing on trying to also get military housing there, military families there because of Southern Command, right? They built the stuff for Southern Command, they still need more room because there's not enough room to uh house all of the uh the officials that that uh work at Southern Command. So we're doing that. And the neat thing is that that's also connected to Dural Trolley. So the Dural Trolley connects to here, takes people to downtown Durral, takes them to Southern Command, takes them all the way to FIU. So if you're a student, and at the same time, one of the things we did is we worked with a foundation, a not-for-profit, uh that helps kids when they age out of foster care, right? Um, and those guys, if you're 18 and you're in foster care, they say thank you very much, go figure it out. And there's a network of and and a gentleman uh who started a foundation that helps pay kids their their rent. And so the problem is they can't find affordable units. So we dedicated 40 units of those to these to these uh uh students that are you have to be a foster in the foster program and you have to be studying or doing something to enhance your life. And there you get to have housing for free because this foundation pays for it. But we set aside units for that. So this is in you know, when you get to decide what you want to develop, that's one of the things that I wanted to do. I wanted to do workforce housing because I think the housing is something that we really need. And everybody, you know, understanding that you could find yourself homeless very easily, you need to be able to find affordable housing in Miami D County. And that becomes harder and harder every day, as you guys know.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:13

And how do you make those numbers work? You said unsubsidized? It's unsubsidized. Is it garden style? It isn't garden style.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:20

So then how do the numbers work? Because to me that seems impossible. It isn't impossible. You can actually make the numbers work. It's the the amount of density we have there, right? And also making sure the construction costs stay very tight, uh, but also having the good unit mix. So we have enough of a unit mix that allows us to get a project that's unsubsidized. Uh, what helped us in the recent times is there's also the live local side of it that helps us with the tax a yeah, but it's even so, concrete costs what it costs.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:49

It does. Um rents are what they are, and it's and the yield on cost that LPs want to see is basically unattainable. So how do you get there with well?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:57

My partner, one of the things is we're keeping this asset. So it's it's a long-term vision of it too. It's not like we're flipping it into an investor and being a merchant developer. When you have the, you know, part of it is we're putting it in a fund. We're gonna build several units. This is one of the projects. We have another project where I'll tell you about that animal services we're working on now, which was on the other side of the Palmetto. Have you ever seen the old animal shelter right off of 74th Street?

SPEAKER_02 1:40:19

I don't think I've seen it. So I I have actually.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:21

Yeah, it's it's a real it's the old one, not the one in Doral. And it's an old crappy uh facility that I mean it doesn't even have air conditioning. Yeah. But in the summer, the animals suffer. You see it on the news all the time. Uh that came through a call we got from the county to say, hey, how do we help the shelter? How do we get money for the to do something for the shelter? But to your point, with the understanding that if you're keeping the asset and you're being doing it with a long-term vision, it makes the numbers return. You're not going to get the same high returns.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:50

No, but even so, I mean, like you said you have 60% AMI units. A certain amount of them, but they're not, they're not, they're not the majority of them.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:58

They're a small portion of them.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:59

Yeah, having any, like those are operating into loss on OpEx, for sure. Yeah. I mean, how do you make the numbers work on a on a deal like that?

SPEAKER_00 1:41:06

It it we were between the the the tax uh relief that we have from Liblo and then the the fact that we were able to do, you know, we got we got the parking garage where we got the units. I think the space is down to like $18,000 of space, which is hard because it's not pedestal parking. It's a it's a standalone parking garage. So that's the key.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:25

If you were to put pedestal parking, I would agree with you. It wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. Right. It would not work. Where like we're doing at Animal Sure, is that pedestal parking, it's going to be a little bit different because of the fact that you have to be able to have the units there just at some market, and then some of them want to.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:39

So it's not garden style, but you have a detached parking garage, which is correct.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:41

A huge, a huge battery. It is a huge pre-cast garage and makes it makes that number work a lot better than if you were to do it in a building in the middle of downtown or something. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 1:41:50

So you're probably building like a six and a quarter, maybe a six and a half. Yeah, around there. Depending. But that's yeah. It's tight.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:59

It's thin. You can't tight. You can't it's tight. Look, what people don't understand in our business is a lot of risk. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of risk. A lot of risk and a lot of headache. But if you know where you're and you're able to navigate it, especially if you're able to navigate the regulatory side, most of the unforeseen problems projects have is they they get uh they get a hit from the regulatory side. That that you know, either something an unforeseen improvement or something that they didn't they didn't expect. Bats. Whatever bats, wetlands, whatever you want to name it. He knows about bats. He knows he knows about the bats. I do. Yes. That's a very bad thing. I've seen those things kill projects in a second. But you know, that's one of the things that that is that's very interesting. And then uh for for us, like for the animal services side of it, you know, we we got creative where um we we've the county called us and we originally we were gonna put it all in one building, but it started making no sense because the problem that we have with the animals right now is that they're being dumped off in the redlands, right? So during COVID, everybody was wonderful. They went and adopted dog, and I'm a dog person, so I have two beautiful dogs at home. I've got they're both rescues. One's a great Dane, one's a great Pyreneese mix. And uh, you know, as being empty nester, they're like the kids now. Yeah. And so I've got a special place in my heart for animals. So we said, let's do this, you know, let's build them a shelter. And so we said the property's value was $18 million, right? So they assessed it and said, our appraisal came back at $18 million. So we'll give you that as the value of the replacement shelter, right? So we went off and we bought a piece of property down south, and we're gonna build them a shelter down south. We're in the middle of going through all the regulatory uh hurdles to get that done. We plan to break ground this summer and open it by next summer, and then we'll swap deeds. And so basically, we'll get medley, they'll get a new shelter for free, basically unlocking their equity in medley, putting it down there, and the public gets an asset they need, and the animals get a great shelter. And you know, we've been fortunately we had uh uh Yolanda Berkowitz, uh Jeff Berkowitz's uh widow. I don't know if Oh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:00

We had Jeff on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:02

Yeah, Jeff, uh great guy. You know, sorry for his law. I mean, he passed away too soon.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:07

Uh, but Yolanda's big and a big animal lover, and uh she particularly loves dogs as well. Uh, she was able to give us guidance on the do's and don'ts of I've never developed, I've never developed a train station or never developed uh an animal shelter. Here I'm doing both, right? And that sort of thing is interesting because it's it's exciting because we're getting to learn about that. And she brought in an architect that knows everything about that. So she donated those services and to give the county somebody to give us the guidance of doing it right. Because when we went to the shelter in Durral, it was a former warehouse turned into a shelter.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:38

Yeah, that's not so is this shelter in the red lines gonna be AC'd?

SPEAKER_00 1:44:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:42

Holy shit. It's got AC'd fucking dogs living, yeah, living, living life well. You got it, man. Miami you need to be able to do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:49

Miami is it's with this heat wave here, man. But uh at the end of the day, it it it creates a public service, brings uh it brings the shelter to the animals now there and all those animals that were that were given back after COVID, because when people adopted during COVID and then gave them back, that allowed uh now they ran out of space. They're they're busting at the scene right now. So the goal, and we have a no-kill shelter here in Miami County. So the animals will live there until they pass away. And so we needed to do something for that there and get get the adoption, making it easier for people to adopt animals down south. So that's part of the story, and we want to be able to get that done uh and then build on that property there, build some more housing. So we'll get into that that that uh site planning and that stuff now. But that'll be something that'll go right after Palmetto, that'll be the next phase to do that property.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:35

So these are all TODU products, the the animal shelters close to the train stage, too.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:39

It's less than a quarter mile. And in fact, it's there's a the trolley, the route trolley stops right in front of it, and we got agreement with Dural to get it there because you want to get people to transit as well. Yeah, people who live in this, they're the two biggest expenses in people's lives are their car and their housing. Yeah. So if you can figure how to make that more economical for people, I think you you're giving them the recipe for success.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:59

Um, I love I love your whole your passion for TOD. What's gonna happen with with Brightline? Um and will there will we ever see a triwell service that's more localized on the FEC rail line?

SPEAKER_00 1:46:13

I really hope so. I think they're they're very close to a deal with uh the county. Um I think part of that is you know making sure Brightline comes out of their their financial stuff and in good shape. Uh, but the county is really committed to doing that. And so Miami Dade County is doing a deal, like I was mentioning before, to do a commuter service.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:31

And so But you said capacity, there are 50 trains right now, capacity 60.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:36

Like, are they gonna have that's including the tri rail trains? Oh, yeah. So they we did a model and it had Brightline has 32 trains, right? Uh a day. FEC has something like it has capacity up to 20 something, but it actually runs less than 20 trains. Well, what freight you mean or freight? And and by the way, Brightline has 16 but 32 round trip trains. So they do 16 trains a day, but it's round trip trains.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:59

And so this would be an add-on to it, and it would be able to have enough capacity. There has to be improvements to it. So they got to add a couple more rails, and then they got to add the stations. It's about, I think at the end of the day, it's close to you know, three, four hundred million dollar project at the end of the day. Uh, and they're gonna need to, you know, they stop at Midtown, stop at uh at uh Winwood, and and they have several stops. I think uh the the next stop after that is gonna be Design District, well, Design District Midtown, and then it's 62nd Street Street, uh Magic City. Yeah, Magic City. 123rd. It's uh not 125th yet, 125th around there. They're gonna skip 79th Street, right? Well, they've been trying, I think that'll be a phase two. Yeah. If it if it's really that successful, and the reason being is because 79th Street is right over a bridge, and that's where the Y is.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:47

Yeah, it's it's tough to get the train station in there, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:47:50

It's very tight to get in there. Not impossible, but it's more costly. And that's something that we say, okay, like if it's successful, we'll add that one later on. But then you've got a uh after that, you got a uh one five one five one FIU, and then you got Aventura as a terminus. Yeah. But the goal is to really create that network of trains, and I think the county is seeing that there's a there's an opportunity because people really are using it. When now Brightline took away, they took away the commuter uh passes and the initiative, people are pissed, they brought it back because they saw that there's a business in that. Yeah, and so ultimately, and those are the express trains. I think once you get that, and that's only coming most of a lot of people from Fort Lauderdale, once you bring the whole system up, that makes a lot of sense because people will use it. There's a lot of people that actually live in Broward that work in Dave. Yeah, there's a staggering amount of people at that.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:38

So, what does your crystal ball say? When do we start getting a local commuter rail service on the FEC?

SPEAKER_00 1:48:44

So if everything pans out they do a deal this year, I think within the next five years it can actually hope so. It's not that hard to build, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:53

Yeah, no, it's not. It's it's not that complicated. Like the the stations are really pretty basic, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:48:58

Like just platform, those platforms, they're not they're not the bright line station. Yeah, like they're and then parking is adjacent parking and stuff like that. So they're they're it is very minimalist in that sense, but that's how you get a system going. Yeah, you know, when we did Brightline, the first that people were like, okay, we're gonna do all this. And I say, no, no, guys, let's just build the basic stuff first, and then you can get into going into the smaller stations like Aventura, like Boca, right? Those are the expansion stations, and eventually you're gonna have something in the treasure coast and something up in Pervard because there's a demand for it. Yeah, and people really want it. So that's it's interesting to see that there is a public outcry for for transportation.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:37

It's great to hear from an insider because it's always like such pure speculation, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:41

It's I'm totally geeking out on this shit. Like this is like I I fucking love talking about trains and real estate. And it's interesting. Your Asperger's just taking over, right? It is, it totally is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:50

But really, look at look look at look at what's happening downtown because of Bright Line. Yeah. I mean, I really I really give these guys a credit for being the catalyst.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:57

I mean, we're we're literally two blocks away, right? And uh I mean it's fully changed. I mean it's fully changed parking lots, guys. I mean like the target here, target here, like yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:08

To bring that public. I remember when we worked on that public, that was in in one of the buildings that we had here. And that was the office building that we developed. People were like, with the public side, are like, you want us to put a public toe? I mean, they they probably killed that deal more times than we knew what to do with it. But it was like, okay, now we the the the the the asset manager drove by there and all he sees is like crying happiness. Because a few years before Brightland, this was a rough oh yeah, up and down first. Uh remember all the tents? And that's what that's what freaked a lot of people out. Investors that would come on here and they're like, you know, when we went to our investors, we actually not take them here. We take them to government center and point from the top. Look at all the land out there, look at all the opportunities. If you walked on the ground, you were this is crazy.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:00

You were stepping over and make sure it's before the sun goes down, too, right? Never, never after the sun went down.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:06

In fact, that's what would happen here at five o'clock. If you I worked in downtown when I started the county, at five o'clock, you had to get the hell out of here because this was not a place to be after five o'clock. It was only government. Remember, this part of town was all government. Yeah, you had the overtown transit village, you had five cents, and that was it. Yeah, people at this time was and now to see all that have you seen World Center?

SPEAKER_01 1:51:27

It's uh it's amazing. Yeah, the whole passe over there now.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:31

Remember when I met and uh and he was this was starting off World Center's totally different than it was starting off at. It was gonna be like this giant mall with some, and then with all the energy and the things that happened, and obviously the changes in retail, they've they pivoted, but it's amazing what they've done there. And every time I see a new building going up, it's like wow, and yet they're leasing out and they're doing great.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:53

I remember going to heat games in like 2011. Is that when I first moved here when LeBron was on the team and parking around the yeah, and it was like, dude, this is gnarly.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:02

No, nobody wanted. I mean, if you parked further down, you were like, that was the cheapest parking. I got like five dollar parking inside of town. Yeah, now people were like they charge 50 bucks to park. Yeah, it's crazy. But that's what the evolution I think with what downtown has become. And it's cool to see that because it's now an Apple store in downtown Miami. It's crazy. Like, what? And and Earls, I mean, all these great spots that we have here. And I think people still haven't even discovered it because I had uh these couple of weeks ago had some interns in my office, and I you know toured them around and said, Hey guys, look look at this, and they're like, This is here. They're like they're like a lot of people in Miami, the natives are really sometimes cruel as of what's going on because they don't they're still thinking that this part of downtown you don't want to go to.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:46

Yeah, well, it's kind of like the COVID time warp, right? Like pre-COVID, none of this existed. No, and no one went out, no one's really gone out since then. It's like all of a sudden, boom, it's all different.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:55

No, no, and and and the fact that look, even the the right line and the food and beverage uh service that it had there, when it shut down, it's like okay, COVID shut it all down, just start it back up again was tough because we're like, who's gonna be here? Who's and all this traffic that's coming by here that can actually sustain itself now? Yeah, you have all these great, you know, shops there that people eat now because there are a lot more people working and living down here. Totally. So it's it's been it's been nice to see that transformation just from a local because you want to see a vibrant city. You go to other cities, you're like, why can't we have that? Yeah, and that's where I would go. I'd say we need to have something like that here, and then that's that gets you excited about doing things like that. And that's where I get excited about these new projects because we should be able to take advantage of all these assets we have. And there's a lot of underutilized assets, and sometimes they come from the government. The government sometimes has a bunch of great assets that they don't know what to do with. And and part of that is I want to you know find ways of giving energy those assets and then bringing public dollars back in because we're not asking for a free lunch, we're willing to pay for it. Like I gave those two examples. The county's gonna make money on Palmetto Station, they're gonna get a rent, they're gonna get a new garage, you know, at the animal shelter, getting a new animal shelter. That sort of thing is what we should be thinking about as developers. I I'm not building any market stuff yet. I'm wanting to see how much of this stuff I can deal with, still balancing out the cost, because that's the biggest, that's the biggest challenge. And and it's a risk, but I'm willing to take it because I think there's something, and and even with our investors, we have a long-term vision of it. And if you have a long-term vision, you're able to see the world a little differently than just like, hey, I'm a merchant developer, and I gotta make sure that when I flip it over, it's got the right basis for the people to buy it. As long as you can convince the LPs. I've got I've got a great I got a great LP who's who believes in us, and and he believes that's the key.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:45

We got a couple good sites from an alacata, maybe. There we go.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:49

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:50

All right, cool. This is awesome. Thanks for calling us in the history of rail. That was awesome. As POD in uh Miami. This is fucking great. We're taking out right now. Um, well, cool. Thank you for your time today, man. Seriously, that was awesome. Appreciate it. And uh uh have a great afternoon, man. Like my man.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:08

Cheers. Cheers.