“Supercitizen” Ken Griffin, as Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava called him, is bringing Carnegie Mellon University to Miami as part of a landmark $3 billion gift. The campus will be transformative for the city, but the real estate purchase that made it possible is already affecting the Wynwood market.
That whale of a deal? Moishe Mana sold Mana Wynwood convention center and surrounding land, a 30-acre property at 318 Northwest 23rd Street, to Griffin for $1.1 billion this week.
Griffin, founder of Citadel and Citadel Securities, has shifted his focus to the Magic City with billions of dollars invested in South Florida. He moved his companies to Miami and is building a skyscraper in Brickell to house their headquarters.
Carnegie Mellon in Wynwood will boost property values and leasing, and could shift the neighborhood’s core farther west, brokers and developers told The Real Deal.
They drew parallels to billionaire Steve Ross’ investment in West Palm Beach and his role in bringing Vanderbilt University to that city. Broker Jordan Karp called the Wynwood deal “multidimensional.”
Construction on Carnegie Mellon University Miami is set to begin next year, with a 2028 opening date.
At full scale, the campus is expected to serve more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students, with nearly 300 faculty and more than 600 staff. The campus will target human health and biological discovery, national security and strategic capabilities, energy and climate resilience, and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation, according to press conferences held by Carnegie Mellon, Griffin and government leaders.
Long term, the campus will raise values and revenue for any periphery assets surrounding the campus, Karp said. “The hotels, the retail, the restaurants and the offices. It’s a compounding domino effect,” he said.
Developer Joseph Schwarzkopf, whose firm Uribe Schwarzkopf is building a mixed-use condo project in Wynwood Norte, said his phone has been ringing off the hook since Wednesday.
“Having the university as a hub for education is what the neighborhood was missing,” he said.
Tony Arellano, managing partner of the brokerage Dwntwn Realty Advisors, compared the deal to LVMH’s landmark investment in the Miami Design District.
“It’s going to polish Wynwood,” he said.
Even the talk of Mana’s sale before it closed accelerated investment in the neighborhood. “We’ve put a few things under contract, and we’ve been in multiple bid scenarios,” Arellano said.
Now that it’s official, “every owner of real estate is calling, asking if we can raise prices.”
Eventually, property values will rise as a result. But Arellano said that more than anything, “This helps anchor the values we were looking for. It just makes what we were looking for far more substantiated and reasonable.”
Carnegie Mellon’s Miami campus will propel a wave of retail leasing closer to Fifth Avenue. That movement west will boost the Allapattah neighborhood, where Mana and others have invested in real estate and where a number of projects are in the pipeline.
“Allapattah is the next Wynwood,” said Kobi Karp, who moved his company, Kobi Karp Architecture & Interior Design, to Wynwood in 2020.
“As a neighbor, I’m very excited. Yes, our property values will go up, but that’s a given,” he said. “What’s really beneficial is the people.”
The students that Carnegie Mellon will attract could become the next generation of Floridians, Karp said, comparing it to Columbia University’s effect in New York.
Wynwood has gone through transformations from a manufacturing hub to an arts district, led by developer Tony Goldman, to a mecca for developers.
“We went from food trucks to the future of education,” Arellano said. “It’s a huge swing.”
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