Last week, Moishe Mana said billionaire Ken Griffin had paid $1.1 billion for Wynwood parcels he assembled, the location slated for a Miami campus that Carnegie Mellon University intends to launch. Griffin has cast that campus as a way to turn Miami into a hub for education and innovation. Mana said he believed the land could fetch even more, and that he sold because he buys into Griffin's blueprint, not because he was chasing a payout. "The whole transaction with Ken, it was not really about the money," he said. "I just passed on the torch."
Mana started scooping up Wynwood real estate in 2009, when the neighborhood was a sprawl of empty lots and warehouse walls covered in graffiti, with underground raves shaking the streets at night. He spent about $70 million acquiring the site he ultimately sold. Prior to the transaction, he floated sweeping redevelopment concepts, and in 2015 proposed building as much as 10 million square feet across what is now Griffin's site, though none of those plans came to fruition.
Mana emigrated from Israel in the 1980s, built a moving company in New York, and evolved into a major force in Miami real estate. He is known as an unconventional player in the city's business circles. He says he once stood up to John Gotti after being threatened for stepping into Mafia-dominated lines of work, and he has ordered enormous renditions of iconic works such as the Mona Lisa and Girl With a Pearl Earring to adorn his downtown buildings. He frequently speaks about unifying the Americas into one economic bloc.
From the beginning, Mana saw echoes of New York's SoHo in Wynwood - a gritty industrial pocket reborn by artists that later drew upscale shops and restaurants. Beyond Wynwood, he has plowed money into the Flagler District and is helping lead a beautification push there. Among his assets have been a convention center, a concert hall, parking facilities and undeveloped parcels, and he said he did not want to see Wynwood turn into a forest of residential towers.
He praised Griffin's effort to refashion Miami, likening him to patrons credited with financing the Italian Renaissance. "Ken is a Medici," Mana said. In downtown Miami, his portfolio encompasses roughly 80 properties.
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Wynwood still morphs into a wild nightlife scene after dark, with outdoor dance clubs booking famous DJs most days of the week. The visual arts are central to the neighborhood's identity and to Miami's Art Basel festivities. Even with new apartments, offices and restaurants, it largely keeps the feel of its past - low-rise industrial buildings wrapped in murals and graffiti, and a landscape with more concrete than trees.
Tony Goldman is often credited with sparking Wynwood's turnaround after he started purchasing real estate there in the 2000s, at a time when the area was packed with derelict factories and warehouses. He retained much of the street art and brought in well known creators such as Shepard Fairey, Kenny Scharf and Brazilian duo Os Gemeos to paint vivid murals for Wynwood Walls, which has since become a ticketed open-air museum. Goldman Properties, founded by Tony Goldman and co-chaired by his daughter Jessica Goldman Srebnick, holds a large share of the blocks near the planned Carnegie Mellon Miami campus, and it also purchased an office building with Griffin this year. "We're grateful that Moishe Mana chose to sell and chose to sell to a group that is going to have monumental impact on the neighborhood," Goldman Srebnick said.
Wynwood's office market competes with Brickell, Miami's financial hub, the site of Citadel's forthcoming flagship tower. According to Blanca Commercial Real Estate, Wynwood's office vacancy hit 22% in the second quarter, versus 15% for Miami overall. Even so, tech and finance names are in the mix.
Amazon.com Inc. operates a satellite office there, and Founders Fund, backed by Peter Thiel, is headquartered in the neighborhood. A glass tower near I-95 owned by Griffin and Goldman counts PricewaterhouseCoopers and Gemini, the Winkelvoss twins' crypto exchange, among its tenants, and it is home to MIAX, an options bourse that launched Miami's first trading floor last year. Architect Kobi Karp, whose practice crafts hotels, offices and retail developments in the district, called the former Mana site "the 50-yard line" and said, "What has been built thus far in Wynwood is not sufficient to supply this coming demand."
A $1.1 billion land purchase tied to a new Carnegie Mellon campus signals Wynwood's next chapter is moving from talk to action. Big owners control key blocks, vacancies are higher than citywide, and blue chip tenants are already planted, which points to more building and leasing rather than quick flips. If you follow Miami property, the tell will be how fast projects and corporate leases stack up in Wynwood compared with Brickell. For locals with skin in the game - whether you own a condo nearby or run a shop - this shift could shape foot traffic, rents and how fast the neighborhood upgrades over the next few years.
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