A mortgage blacklist, Surfside ‘mansions' and other Miami real estate trends
Miami real estate in 2025 is marked by affordability challenges and key shifts in housing options. While rents have eased slightly, the city remains one of the least affordable rental markets, with median incomes falling short of what's needed to pay typical rent. Condo owners face new hurdles as hundreds of buildings land on secret mortgage blacklists, driven by stricter post-Surfside safety rules and soaring insurance costs.
Developers are responding with both ultra-luxury condos like The Delmore, planned for the former Surfside collapse site, and new workforce housing projects such as The Era in Fort Lauderdale, aimed at first responders and city employees. These trends reveal a housing market grappling with rising costs, evolving regulations, and significant gaps in affordability for many Miamians.
A rendering shows plans for The Delmore, an ultra-luxury condo building with units starting at $15 million, at the site of the 2021 condo collapse at 8777 Collins Ave. in Surfside.
NO. 1: 'MANSIONS' PLANNED AT SURFSIDE COLLAPSE SITE. DO DEVELOPERS 'HOPE PEOPLE FORGET' TRAGEDY?
'They can pull out all their bells and whistles ... It doesn't change the fact that their entire site is a graveyard,' said a former town commissioner. | Published January 28, 2025 | Read Full Story by Aaron Leibowitz
A view of a resurgent Northeast Second Avenue in the heart of Miami's Overtown neighborhood in April 2021, with the Plaza at the Lyric apartments at left and a Red Rooster restaurant in the background at right. By Pedro Portal
NO. 2: RENTERS ARE PAYING LESS FOR APARTMENTS IN MIAMI, BUT THERE ARE ISSUES. SEE THE COSTS
Here's a look at housing costs and ways to navigate the crisis. | Published March 14, 2025 | Read Full Story by Howard Cohen
The Era, Affiliated Development's latest project, is currently under construction in Fort Lauderdale. The apartment building is meant to help address the area's lack of affordable workforce housing.
NO. 3: NEW FORT LAUDERDALE APARTMENT WILL OFFER 'LUXURY' AFFORDABLE HOUSING TO CITY'S WORKFORCE
The ongoing development efforts come as an affordable housing crisis continues embroiling South Florida, where residents are the most rent-burdened people in the country. | Published March 25, 2025 | Read Full Story by Amanda Rosa
Condos line the Intracoastal Waterway in Sunny Isles Beach. By MATIAS J. OCNER
NO. 4: 'PERFECT STORM.' HUNDREDS OF SOUTH FLORIDA CONDOS NOW ON SECRET MORTGAGE BLACKLIST
The number of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach condos on the list has more than doubled in just two years. | Published April 4, 2025 | Read Full Story by Andres Viglucci
The summary above was drafted with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists in our News division. All stories listed were reported, written and edited by McClatchy journalists.
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Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
How the Trump tax bill could help China win at A.I.
Republicans in Congress produced a surprise winner this week when they axed hundreds of billions of dollars in federal clean-energy subsidies: China's artificial intelligence industry. China is pouring money into energy production to support its bid to dominate AI. America's tech industry, meanwhile, has been scrounging for more energy to run power-hungry AI data centers and strongly urged Congress not to wipe out solar and wind tax credits. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. Solar panels and windmills are the fastest-growing sources of power in the United States, accounting for 80 percent of new energy being added to the grid. Yet Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials remain intent on stifling clean energy progress in America, calling it Biden-era folly. Now the consequences of the massive cuts in the GOP tax and budget bill are coming into focus. Modeling of the package by energy economists shows they will substantially reduce the amount of electricity added to the U.S. power grid in the coming years, even as China races ahead. Wind and solar power 'is critical in the near term,' said Ben King, director of the U.S. energy program at the Rhodium Group, a research firm that has developed projections of the bill's impact. 'This creates a risk that energy projects just won't get built. At the same time, China is adding staggering electricity capacity.' The wind and solar electricity that China added to its power grid in just the first five months of this year is more than quadruple all the new electricity the U.S. added to its grid from all sources in 2024. China is simultaneously rapidly expanding its fleet of fossil fuel and nuclear plants. The Trump administration plans to accelerate new electricity generation from natural gas and nuclear power, but those efforts will take years, experts warn. There are no major new nuclear plants under construction, and they can take a decade or more to build. A global backlog of gas turbines means it can take five years just to build a single gas-powered plant. 'We need a huge amount of electricity after 20 years in which we did not have to deal with rising demand,' said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. 'Other countries are moving fast and being quite innovative. If we are not adding new power to the grid, companies are going to have to get it from other places.' According to the think tank Energy Innovation, the cuts in the Senate's version of the bill, which survived the House vote intact Thursday, would reduce the amount of new electricity the U.S. is able to bring online over the next decade by 344 gigawatts - enough to power nearly half the homes in the country. The loss of such generation would create an immense challenge for not just AI companies, but other industries needing to power factories as well as residential customers struggling with rising utility costs. The models are built on the premise that the loss of tax credits will boost development costs, which would require solar and wind operators to force up rates, rattling investors and risking the viability of projects. The 344 gigawatts in new power that Energy Innovation estimates would be lost is based on an assumption that solar and wind development drops 50 percent by 2035. The Trump administration waves away such warnings as overblown. The president says the tax credits that have propelled the growth of renewable energy in the U.S. are a 'scam,' arguing that wind and solar installations are a blight on the landscape. The administration contends intermittent energy produced by wind and solar, despite advances in battery technology, don't meet the needs of industry, especially the enormous, 24/7 demands of AI data centers. Energy Secretary Chris Wright calls renewable energy a 'parasite' on the power grid, undermining its stability and consuming transmission-line capacity that could be delivering more stable gas or nuclear energy. "Winning the AI race will require a significantly larger supply of around-the-clock, reliable, and uninterrupted power – unfortunately, this was not a priority of the last administration,' he said in a statement Wednesday night. Tech firms and their industry groups say eliminating the tax incentives for clean power hamstrings their ability to compete with Chinese AI development. They also say it could lead to soaring electricity prices in the United States. Both the Data Center Coalition and the Clean Energy Buyers Association, industry groups led by tech firms, warned lawmakers that the imperiled tax credits are needed for domestic AI growth. The key tax credits for large wind and solar installations will be phased out for projects not under construction by the end of June 2026 under the bill, which Trump hoped to sign Friday following expected House passage. The Biden-era incentives would have extended into the 2030s. There are thousands of eligible projects that have been announced but not yet started, amounting to a half-trillion dollars in planned investment, according to Energy Innovation. Now the question is how many of those projects can start construction before the deadline. Depending on how many projects can get shovels in the ground quickly, said Aaron Zubaty, chief executive of Eolian, a large clean energy developer, 'the U.S. has a fighting chance to keep major data center developments domestic and not lose them to the Middle East.' But, he said, China's advantage is nonetheless cemented by the budget bill. 'I've had multiple people I work with in Europe say to me that it is pretty clear who is going to be the dominant superpower in a decade, and that it will not be the U.S.,' he said. 'Dominance now depends on who has the most electricity. And by only building new gas, coal, and nuclear power plants you are not going to be able to grow U.S. supply quickly enough.' Industry officials say countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are aggressively courting American AI projects, offering plentiful, cheap power from renewables and gas. But locating major U.S. AI infrastructure in a region where alliances are constantly shifting and enemy combatants are an arm's length away 'is not good for America's national security interests or its economy,' Bordoff said. To keep up with the demands of AI and other industries, federal regulators say the United States needs to add to its grid by 2035 the amount of power used by all of California, Texas and New York combined. Many companies are feeling burned by the abrupt reversal of clean energy incentives, said Jason Grumet, chief executive of the American Clean Power Association, which represents several large companies heavily invested in both gas and renewables. As the Trump administration encourages investment in gas plants, companies are left to wonder if the federal support will still be there after a new president is in office. 'Every part of the energy economy is worried that they will make investments that in four years will be disfavored by the next administration,' Grumet said. 'We need durable energy policy.' Related Content Arthur Ashe's knack for reinvention led him to history at Wimbledon Newlywed detained by ICE freed after 141 days and two deportation attempts The Met opens a dazzling wing of non-European art Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
New York Post
7 hours ago
- New York Post
Wrong and more wrong: How America's ‘experts' burned their last shreds of credibility
The first six months of the Trump administration have not been kind to the experts and the degree-holding classes. Almost daily during the tariff hysterias of March, we were told by university economists and most of the PhDs employed in investment and finance that the United States was headed toward a downward, if not recessionary, spiral. Most economists lectured that trade deficits did not really matter. Advertisement Or they insisted that the cures to reduce them were worse than the $1.1 trillion deficit itself. They reminded us that free, rather than fair, trade alone ensured prosperity. So, the result of Trump's foolhardy tariff talk would be an impending recession. Advertisement America would soon suffer rising joblessness, inflation — or rather a return to stagflation — and likely little, if any, increase in tariff revenue as trade volume declined. Instead, recent data show increases in tariff revenue. Personal real income and savings were up. Job creation exceeded prognoses. Advertisement There was no surge in inflation. The supposedly 'crashed' stock market reached historic highs. Common-sense Americans might not have been surprised: The prior stock market frenzy was predicated on what was, in theory, supposed to have happened rather than what was likely to occur. Advertisement After all, if tariffs were so toxic and surpluses irrelevant, why did our affluent European and Asian trading rivals insist on both surpluses and protective tariffs? Most Americans recalled that the mere threat of tariffs and Trump's jawboning had led to several trillion dollars in promised foreign investment and at least some plans to relocate manufacturing and assembly back to the United States. Would that change in direction not lead to business optimism and eventually more jobs? Would countries purposely running up huge surpluses through asymmetrical trade practices not have far more to lose in negotiations than those suffering gargantuan deficits? Were Trump's art-of-the-deal threats of prohibitive tariffs not mere starting points in negotiations that would eventually lead to likely agreements more favorable to the United States than in the past, and moderate rather than punitive tariffs? Would not the value of the huge American consumer market mean that our trade partners, who were racking up substantial surpluses, would agree they could afford modest tariffs and trim their substantial profit margins rather than suicidally price themselves out of a lucrative market entirely? Illegal immigration: wrong again Economists and bureaucrats were equally wrong on the border. We were told for four years that only 'comprehensive immigration reform' would stop illegal immigration. Advertisement Most Americans differed: They knew firsthand we had more than enough immigration laws, but had elected as President Joe Biden, who deliberately destroyed borders and had no intention of enforcing existing laws. Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington. Subscribe here! When Trump promised he would ensure that, instead of 10,000 foreign nationals entering illegally each day, within a month no one would, our experts scoffed. But if the border patrol went from ignoring or even aiding illegal immigrants to stopping them right at the border, why would such a prediction be wrong? Advertisement Those favoring a reduction in illegal immigration and deportations also argued that crime would fall, and citizen job opportunities would increase, given an estimated 500,000 aliens with criminal records had entered illegally during the Biden administration, while millions of other illegal aliens were working off the books, for cash, and often at reduced wages. Indeed, once the border was closed tightly, hundreds of thousands were returned to their countries, and employers began turning to US citizens. Job opportunities did increase. Crime did go down. Advertisement Legal-only immigration regained its preferred status over illegal entry. Trump talked of trying voluntary deportation — again to wide ridicule from immigration 'experts.' But why would not a million illegal aliens wish to return home 'voluntarily' — if they were given free flights, a $1,000 bonus and, most importantly, a chance later to reapply for legal entry once they arrived home? Iran fears came to naught Many of our national security experts warned that taking out Iran's nuclear sites was a fool's errand. Advertisement It would supposedly unleash a Middle East tsunami of instability. It would cause a wave of terrorism. It would send oil prices skyrocketing. It would not work, ensuring Iran would soon reply with nuclear weapons. In fact, oil prices decreased after the American bombing. A twenty-five-minute entrance into Iranian airspace and bombing led to a ceasefire, not a conflagration. As for a big power standoff, World War III and 30,000 dead, common sense asked why China would wish the Strait of Hormuz to close, given that it imports half of all Middle Eastern oil produced? Why would Russia — bogged down in Ukraine and suffering nearly a million casualties — wish to mix it up in Iran, after ignominiously fleeing Syria and the fall of its Assad clients? Russia usually thinks of Russia, period. It does not lament when tensions elsewhere are expected to spike oil prices. Why would Russia resupply Iran's destroyed Russian-made anti-aircraft systems, when it was desperate to ward off Ukrainian air attacks on its homeland, and Iran would likely again lose any imported replacements? As for waves of terror, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis have suffered enormous losses from Israel. Their leadership has been decapitated; their streams of Iranian money have been mostly truncated. Why would they rush to Iran's side to war with Israel, when Iran did not come to their aid when they were battling and losing to the Israelis? Has a theater-wide war really ever started when one side entered and left enemy territory in 25 minutes, suffering no casualties and likely killing few of the enemy? As far as the extent of damage to Iran's nuclear infrastructure, why should we believe our expert pundit class? Prior to the American and Israeli bombing, many of them warned that Iran was not on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, and therefore, there was little need for any such preemptive action. Then, post facto, the same experts flipped. Now they claimed, after the bombing severely damaged most Iranian nuclear sites, that there was an increased threat, given that some enriched uranium (which they had previously discounted) surely had survived and thus marked a new existential danger of an Iranian nuclear bomb. Was Trump really going to 'blow up,' 'destroy' or 'cripple' NATO, as our diplomatic experts insisted, when his first-term jawboning led from six to twenty-three nations meeting their 2% of GDP defense-spending promises? Given two ongoing theater-wide wars, given Trump's past correct predictions about the dangers of the Nord Stream II pipeline, given the vulnerability of an anemic NATO to Russian expansionism, and given that Russian leader Vladimir Putin did not invade during Trump's first term, unlike the three presidencies before and after his own, why wouldn't NATO agree to rearm with 5%, and appreciate Trump's efforts both to bolster the capability of the alliance and the need to end the Ukraine war? Why the 'experts' repeatedly fail Why were our 'scientific' pollsters so wrong in the last three presidential elections, and so at odds with the clearly discernible electoral shifts in the general electorate? Where were crackpot ideas like defund the police, transgender males in women's sports and open borders first born and nurtured? Answer: the university, and higher education in general. The list of wrongheaded, groupthink, and degreed expertise could be vastly expanded. We remember the '51 intelligence authorities' who swore the Hunter Biden laptop was 'likely' cooked up by the Russians. Our best and brightest economists signed letters insisting that Biden's multitrillion-dollar wasteful spending would not result in inflation spikes. Our global warming professors' past predictions should have ensured that Americans were now boiling, with tidal waves destroying beachfront communities, including Barack Obama's two multimillion-dollar estates. Our legal eagles, after learning nothing from the bogus Mueller investigation and adolescent Steele dossier, but with impressive Ivy League degrees, pontificated for years that Trump by now would be in jail for life, given 91 'walls-are-closing-in' and 'bombshell' indictments. So why are the degreed classes so wrong, and yet so arrogantly never learn anything from their past flawed predictions? One, our experts usually receive degrees from our supposedly marquee universities. But as we are now learning from long overdue autopsies of institutionalized campus racial bias, neo-racial segregation, 50%-plus price-gouging surcharges on federal grants, and rabid antisemitism, higher education in America has become anti-Enlightenment. Universities now wage war against free-thinkers, free speech, free expression and anything that freely questions the deductive groupthink of the diversity/equity/inclusion commissariat, and global warming orthodoxies. The degreed expert classes emerge from universities whose faculties are 90 to 95% left-wing and whose administrations are overstaffed and terrified of their radical students. The wonder is not that the experts are incompetent and biased, but that there are a brave few who are not. Two, Trump drove the degreed class insane to the degree it could no longer, even if it were willing and able (and it was not), offer empirical assessments of his policies. From his crude speech to his orange skin to his Queens accent to his MAGA base to his remarkable counterintuitive successes and to his disdain for the bicoastal elite, our embarrassing experts would rather be dead wrong and anti-Trump than correct in their assessments — if they in any small way helped Trump. Three, universities are not just biased, but increasingly mediocre and ever more isolated from working Americans and their commonsense approaches to problem solving. PhD programs in general are not as rigorous as they were even two decades ago. Grading, assessments, and evaluations in professional schools must increasingly weigh non-meritocratic criteria, given their admissions and hiring protocols are not based on disinterested evaluation of past work and expertise. The vast endowments of elite campuses, the huge profit-making foreign enrollments, and the assured, steady stream of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid created a sense of fiscal unreality, moral smugness, unearned superiority and ultimately, blindness to just how isolated and disliked the professoriate had become. But the public has caught on that too many Ivy-League presidents were increasingly a mediocre, if not incompetent, bunch. Most university economists could not run a small business. The military academies did not always turn out the best generals and admirals. The most engaging biographers were not professors. And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting. Add it all up, and the reputation of our predictors, prognosticators and experts has been radically devalued — to the point of utter worthlessness. Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.
USA Today
8 hours ago
- USA Today
How to save thousands on a car by stacking Trump's tax credits with Biden's
If you've been thinking about buying a new electric vehicle, you have less than three months to bundle tax credits from both Joe Biden's and Donald Trump's administrations. Consider how each president's signature piece of legislation could help you save on a new car: ◾ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act: The Biden-era incentive gives you up to a $7,500 tax credit for new, plug-in EVs or fuel-cell electric vehicles. Trump's massive tax and spending policy bill will end this credit on Sept. 30. ◾ 'Big Beautiful Bill': Trump's new law offers an annual tax credit of up to a $10,000 on the interest of loans for new vehicles as long as they're less than 14,000 pounds and assembled in the United States. It covers purchases made in 2025 through 2028. Big Beautiful Bill 101: What you need to know about the new law How long Biden's and Trump's tax credits for new cars last Unable to view our graphics? Click here to see them. More: What new version of Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' could mean for EV car buyers and automakers How to stack the auto tax credits Here's how combining Biden's and Trump's tax credits over the next four years could save you a hunk of money on an EV: A new EV might not be the best investment To be sure, this strategy might not be the best way to stretch your dollar. But perhaps you're set on purchasing a new EV with the latest gadgets and upgrades. The average price paid for a new EV this year has been $57,734, according to Kelley Blue Book. Even with the $7,500 tax credit, the EV premium over a gas-powered car is about $1,500. The math tips in favor of EVs when you look at the five-year fuel costs: $9,490 for gas-powered vs. $4,295, according to Kelley Blue Book. If you can live without the new-car smell, used EVs' average listing price this year is about $20,000 less than for new models, according to Kelley Blue Book. You can also get a $4,000 tax credit from Biden's legislation for a used EV, but that wouldn't qualify you for the Trump tax credit. Some additional fine print to consider if you use either of these tax credits ◾ Big Beautiful Bill: The tax credit for auto loans phases out for incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 for an individual and between $200,000 and $250,000 if you file jointly. It's not available for fleet purchases, commercial vehicles or leasing. ◾ Inflation Reduction Act: To take advantage of the EV credit, you also must buy the car − assembled in North America − for your own use. Your income must to fall below $150,000 for an individual and $300,000 for those filing jointly.
