Bored and rich, Hank Sopher was tooling around Miami a few years ago looking for something to do with his time and money. He spied some For Sale signs along Biscayne Boulevard and knew a new concert hall was coming.

So the parking-lot magnate laid down $2 million for an abandoned rug showroom across from the site. Less than two years later, in May 2002, he sold it for $4.3 million, said his broker, Edie Laquer.

LUCRATIVE GAMBLE

Sopher was one of the first real estate speculators to gamble on the future Performing Arts Center transforming a scruffy expanse of fast-food joints and failed businesses in the nearby Park West and Omni areas into a safe and fashionable neighborhood.

''It's going to wipe out the prostitution and the derelicts and the drugs,'' said Sopher, now running for city commissioner in Miami Beach.

As workers assemble the metal framework of the performance hall, the scruffiness remains. But developers have launched more than a dozen high-end condominium and loft projects nearby, with prices starting in the $200,000s and moving well past $1 million. A group of publicists hired by developers recently coined a slogan for the area: the Miami Arts District.

BETTING ON THE FUTURE

Though developers report strong early sales, most of the projects are still waiting to break ground -- meaning the economic ripple effects of the arts center will remain a question mark.

''I would be suspicious that this is actually going to turn around that neighborhood,'' Northwestern University professor Irving Rein said of Miami's Performing Arts Center.

But Rein, who has not studied the Miami project, noted it is unusual to have developers launching residential projects before a large venue is even built.

And others point to Lincoln Center, the concert hall that helped revive Manhattan's West Side.

''When I worked in New York City in the 1960s, you couldn't walk on the West Side,'' Sopher said. ``It was very much like the Park West area.''

Fuente: The Miami Herald
Noviembre - 2003