A planned residential development featuring 446 homes in Florida City will receive partial funding through a Community Development District (CDD).
Zamora Corporation has proposed the Old Town Floridian CDD for a vacant, agriculturally designated 77.1-acre site located at the northeast corner of Southwest 336th Street and Southwest 192nd Avenue/Tower Road, according to the company’s filings with Miami-Dade County and details on the project’s website.
The master-planned Old Town Floridian is designed to include 178 villas, 160 townhomes, and 108 single-family homes, according to submitted plans. The proposed site layout indicates that the residences would be arranged around two existing lakes on the property.
Community Development Districts are quasi-governmental entities established to help finance and maintain infrastructure such as roads, water and sewer lines, sidewalks, and other improvements within large-scale developments. Initially, the CDD board is composed of representatives from the developer. CDDs issue bonds that are repaid through special assessments, which are first paid by the developer and later passed on to homebuyers.
The Old Town Floridian CDD received approval from Florida City commissioners in 2020, followed by Miami-Dade County commissioners in 2021, as noted in the filings from the CDD’s February board meeting.
Capital improvement costs for the district are projected at approximately $12 million. This includes $6.8 million allocated for roads, $2.6 million for sanitary collection, almost $2 million for water connections, and $937,000 for stormwater management. The CDD intends to cover a portion of these expenses by issuing an $8.6 million bond, according to the meeting documents.
The filings note that Zamora Corporation is led by Rosa Zamora.
Since the early 2000s, developers in Florida have increasingly used CDDs to finance infrastructure for large suburban housing projects, particularly on the state’s west coast. Builders such as Lennar and D.R. Horton have frequently utilized this model.
In recent years, the CDD financing structure has become more common in South Florida, coinciding with a surge in large-scale projects across the region. For example, the developers behind Miami Worldcenter—Art Falcone and Nitin Motwani—partnered with Los Angeles-based CIM Group to establish a CDD for the $6 billion project, which spans 10 city blocks in downtown Miami. In 2017, this CDD issued $74.1 million in tax-exempt bonds.
In 2023, city commissioners in Sunrise approved a Community Development District for Metropica, a 64-acre master-planned project at 1800 Northwest 136th Street in Sunrise that will include 3,300 residential high-rise units. Developer Joseph Kavana, through the CDD, is authorized to issue up to $65 million in bonds for infrastructure and services for a 50-acre portion of the development.
Also in Sunrise, the city approved the formation of the Solterra Community Development District, which will provide infrastructure financing for developers Armando Codina and Jim Carr’s planned 900-home community at 7400 Northwest 24th Place.
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