Brown Mackie moves to Miami Herald building
The college's lease of 51,000 square feet ranks among the biggest downtown Miami office deals this year. The under-construction Met 2 office building announced a 50,000-square-foot lease with accounting and advisory firm Deloitte earlier this year.
The Brown Mackie deal, brokered by Alan Kleber at Cushman & Wakefield and Steven Hurwitz at CREC, is for 10 years. Prices weren't disclosed but said to be in the low $30-a-square-foot range.
Brown Mackie, which has outposts from Tuscon, Ariz., to Akron, Ohio, plans to open at the new location in September. The college offers associate degrees and bachelor's of science degrees in programs such as business management, early childhood education and computer technology. The Miami school has roughly 750 students.
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SHOPPING: Miami is a bookstore desert - THE HOME OF NEXT WEEK'S FAIR HAS NO
GENERAL-INTEREST BOOK SHOPS
But if you're looking for a comprehensive, general-interest bookstore within city boundaries any other time of the year, buena suerte. There is none.
You read that right: Miami , a major city of more than 360,000 people, has not a single such bookstore anywhere. Not downtown. Not in Coconut Grove. Not in the Upper East Side. There is no Borders, no Barnes & Noble, no multilingual independent beyond a smattering of niche stores.
"Shocking," said Robert Gibbs, a Michigan-based planner and urban retail consultant who has worked all over the country, including Miami . "We even have a Borders in downtown Detroit."
And there isn't much in the offing, apart from a planned independent store in the Grove. The city 's two new retail developments -- Midtown Miami and Mary Brickell Village -- have no bookstores and no immediate prospects.
Certainly, Miami has some well-established specialized booksellers -- among others, Lambda Passages, a gay and lesbian bookstore on upper Biscayne Boulebard and Afro-In Books & Things in Liberty City . It also has a few Spanish-language stores, including Libreria Universal, long a beacon for Cuban literary culture and history on Southwest Eighth Street.
And there are general-interest bookstores aplenty in the suburbs -- from chain stores in Aventura and Kendall to the redoubtable independent Books & Books, with branches in Coral Gables, Miami Beach and Bal Harbour.
So why should it matter that in Miami -- with its diverse population, the region's largest employment center downtown, an ostensibly sophisticated international repute, and a recent wave of intense urban redevelopment -- there's zilch?
Booksellers, book lovers, retailers and planners say bookstores function not just as fulcrums of culture, learning and community, but as key ingredients in a successful mercantile mix in urban commercial centers.
And can Miami claim to be a center of arts, culture and commerce without a major bookstore in its city limits? How can a city have a new half-billion-dollar performing arts center but no bookstore ?
"I would have thought someone would have put a bookstore in there somewhere," said Les Standiford, bestselling author and chairman of Florida International University's creative writing program, referring to new development across the city .
MANY FACTORS
Why the lack of stores? No one is quite sure, but many factors may play a role, including high rents, a large non-English speaking population and the absence of a retail district with foot traffic sufficiently heavy and deep-pocketed to sustain the low-margin business of bookselling.
The independent Bookworm in the Grove is but a distant memory. More recently, chain stores pulled out of Bayside Marketplace downtown and Cocowalk in the Grove.
"It's tough," said Miami Book Fair co-founder Raquel Roque, owner of the tiny Downtown Book Center, which her father opened in 1965 after arriving from Cuba. Though she still carries some English-language books, newspapers and magazines, she said, "we've had to switch to Spanish to survive. It just reflects finances and the population."
Her store's clientele, she said, is mostly now recently arrived immigrants looking for English-instruction books and bargain novels. She keeps the doors open thanks to a thriving wholesale Spanish-language book distribution business.
Other Spanish-language bookstores in the city also look beyond a local clientele to Web sales. Customers for Libreria Universal's broad stock of Cuba-related books are all over the country, said owner Juan Manuel Salvat.
The trend is clear, Salvat said: General-interest bookstores , especially those trading principally in English, have gone where the biggest concentrations ofbook-buyers are, in well-off enclaves like Pinecrest, Coral Gables and Aventura.
Census estimates tell part of the story. Book-buying is closely linked to education, experts say. In 2006, only 22 percent of adult Miamians had a bachelor's degree. In Coral Gables, it was 58 percent.
Chain stores in particular have developed location formulas that demand lots of well-heeled, well-educated people, said Gibbs, the Michigan consultant: within a five-mile radius, 75,000 people with a bachelor's degree or higher and annual incomes of $75,000 or more.
They also require several contiguous anchor stores selling clothing and home furnishings, and as many as 10 restaurants, he said. "They can't work by themselves," Gibbs said. "All of those retailers reinforce each other."
But Miami has long suffered a shortage of retail of all stripes, from supermarkets to clothing stores.
That has prompted an effort by Miami Mayor Manny Diaz to lure new stores to the city . High on the wish list: a bookstore , said Diaz' retail consultant, John Talmage, CEO of Social Compact, a nonprofit that promotes investment in inner- city areas.
"It's hard to say you are a literate, knowledge-based community if books are not part of the mix," Talmage said.
The best option for Miami , Talmage and others say: independents who can tailor themselves to the local market.
A COMMUNITY SERVICE
That's what Felice Dubin hopes to do in Coconut Grove, where giant Borders couldn't make the numbers work. The longtime Groveite and Village Council member and a business partner, Sandy Francis, are installing a bookstore in the old Banana Republic space on a prime corner on Grand Avenue .
Call it a community service, said Dubin, who has no bookselling experience. The Bookstore in the Grove will have not only books but a bar serving wine and organic free-trade coffee, unusual gifts, and toys for a targeted clientele of both locals and tourists.
"We're working every angle," said Dubin, who hopes to open by Thanksgiving. "Everybody is so desperately wanting a bookstore that, if we're any good at all, people will come."
The rest of the city will eventually catch up, others say, maybe once downtown's new condo towers fill up.
"There will be bookstores in the city of Miami ," said Books & Books owner, Mitchell Kaplan, who has considered Miami but hasn't found a viable site. "It will have to be something so powerful it becomes a destination by itself. But it's just a matter of when and how."