The Rader Memorial United Methodist Church in South Florida’s El Portal had a hole beneath its steeple.
A chain-link fence encircles the shuttered sanctuary, and on a recent weekday in February, a half dozen residents clustered nearby as an excavator idled beside the two-story building, hoping to save it from Adam Neumann’s wrecking ball.
Dust and debris spilled from the breach in the façade as neighbors surveyed the damage, which felt more than physical. For 75 years, the church had been the village’s signature property, and tearing it down seemed like proof that billionaire Neumann was moving forward with plans to replace the church with a private school founded by his wife, Rebekah Neumann.
“We did not know that this was going to be happening today,” Ashley Lucio, one of the residents standing in front of the fence, said. Lucio runs a group called Preserve El Portal “with the express purpose of setting up our community for historic designation,” she said.
Worse, added resident and former council member Vimari Roman, “we have a village council that is not prepared to oppose something like this.”
To Lucio, Roman and other locals, the timing stung almost as much as the teardown. The village had scheduled a town hall four days later to address community concerns about SOLFL, the Neumanns’ proposed nature-themed K-through-12 Jewish school. The name is short for “Students of Life, For Life,” but it’s pronounced “Soulful.”
The anger taps into a broader anxiety now roiling this tiny Northeast Miami-Dade village: that Neumann — the WeWork co-founder whose brand of visionary hype and hypergrowth imploded on Wall Street — is poised to reshape El Portal’s main commercial corridor, and possibly its identity, with the school and an accompanying large-scale multifamily development.
He’s got leverage. Because Florida’s Live Local zoning gives tax advantages to high-rises or high-density projects that set aside 40 percent of apartments for affordable and workforce housing, some El Portal denizens believe Neumann’s project is the best hedge against more intrusive development. Yet others fear that more Live Local developers will follow Neumann, or that the school proposal could morph into a high-rise mixed-use project if Neumann doesn’t get his way.
The Israeli-born entrepreneur co-founded WeWork in 2010 and rode a wave of cheap capital and “community” branding to a private valuation that peaked at $47 billion. After leaving WeWork with a $445 million exit package, Neumann pivoted to multifamily and condo development with his new venture, Miami-based Flow. The firm has raised $450 million since 2022 and has a valuation of $2.5 billion. Flow’s power moves include partnering with Canada Global and Yakir Gabay’s Yellowstone Trust to buy a majority stake in Chetrit Group’s 4-million-square-foot mixed-use project along the Miami River with 1,900 planned apartments. The firm also acquired the largest tract in El Portal, 16 acres zoned for a mixed-use project with 2,000-plus apartments.
Yet Neumann’s past looms large in the minds of El Portal’s residents and may explain why this small town is mounting the fiercest opposition to his plans since the market scoffed at his attempt to take WeWork public in 2019.
Neumann and SOLFL said that more residents support the school project than oppose it. “The site has historically been used as a community nonprofit space,” a spokesperson for Neumann and the school wrote in an email. “We are excited about continuing this type of use rather than the commercial buildings that were previously planned before us.”
Neumann’s El Portal land play
El Portal is one of South Florida’s last frontiers. It’s primarily made up of single-family homes and apartment buildings of just two floors. With a total area less than 1 square mile and roughly 2,000 residents, El Portal sits on the border of Miami’s northeastern edge, its quaint feel making it appealing for developers seeking “new” neighborhoods. Yet, El Portal residents have fought hard to maintain their village’s character, warding off previous plans to redevelop the church property before Neumann’s arrival.
The church actually wasn’t the first piece of real estate that caught Neumann’s attention in El Portal.
In 2025, Flow partnered with Canada Global to buy the former Little Farm mobile home park at 8500 Biscayne Boulevard in the village. The 16-acre site for decades housed a low-income trailer community, until a prior redevelopment bid pushed out residents, though that later collapsed in litigation and receivership. The Flow joint venture paid $71.5 million for the property, financing the bulk of the purchase with a $51 million loan from Ladder Capital.
The partnership is entitled to build a roughly 3-million-square-foot mixed-use project with more than 2,380 apartments, plus commercial space and a school, taking the site close to the 150 units per acre allowed under village zoning. Detailed plans for the Little Farm redevelopment have yet to be formally presented to residents, though the scale has fueled fears that El Portal’s modest strip on Northeast Second Avenue could soon be framed by towers.
“Adam Neumann and his people have bullied their way into El Portal. And we have a village council that is not prepared to oppose something like this.”
Shortly after the Little Farm acquisition, a Neumann-linked entity pivoted to the church.
In March of last year, TOL Real Estate, an affiliate tied to SOLFL, paid $13.7 million for the Rader Memorial United Methodist Church campus at 205 NE 87th Street and two nearby homes — roughly $8 million more than the site traded for in 2021. The 2-acre assemblage sits at the eastern edge of a largely single-family neighborhood, with the two-story sanctuary facing Northeast Second Avenue.
The Rader property already had a development history. The prior owner had secured approvals to convert the church into a mixed-use project with offices, retail and restaurants. Those plans never materialized, in part because the building needed millions of dollars in renovations and lacked basic infrastructure, such as a sanitary sewer connection that would be required for any restaurant or intensive commercial use, according to neighbors and village documents. County permitting records also show that the previous owner, an affiliate of Miami-based Elm Springs, had applied for a demolition permit.
Longtime resident Edna Edelman, who lives near the site, said multiple owners had tried and failed to make a project pencil out. “They didn’t have the deep enough pockets to handle it,” she said.
Flow isn’t the only developer driving El Portal’s burst of commercial and
multifamily activity or the backlash to it.
The Kavista Apartments — a mid-rise project on the village’s west side — opened recently and became a political flashpoint. Owners of the building retroactively applied to reclassify it under the state’s Live Local Act, reducing its taxable value and shifting more of the village’s fiscal burden onto homeowners, said resident Kayla Delacerda. “El Portal should have negotiated a contract with the Kavista by which that would be disallowed,” she said.
A second multifamily project by Kavista’s developer is now stalled after a resident filed a lawsuit to block it, underscoring how even modest density in El Portal can trigger litigation and intense neighborhood pushback. Against that backdrop, Neumann’s twin moves — controlling the largest development site in town and the village’s most visible landmark — landed like a tectonic shift.
From WeGrow to SOLFL
The controversy in El Portal is inseparable from Neumann’s history.
The idea that WeWork was a tech-forward platform that would “elevate the world’s consciousness” fell apart in 2019, when WeWork’s S-1 filing exposed billions in losses, convoluted governance and extensive related-party deals benefiting Neumann personally. The company pulled its IPO, SoftBank engineered a bailout and Neumann was pushed out as CEO with a package that ultimately allowed him to cash out significant shares while rank-and-file employees saw their paper wealth evaporate.
Alongside the co-working behemoth, Rebekah Neumann had launched WeGrow, a boutique private school, inside WeWork’s Chelsea headquarters in Manhattan. The K-through-5 program blended standard academics with yoga, “conscious entrepreneurship,” farm visits and creative projects and cost as much as $40,000 a year. It never scaled beyond roughly 100 students and closed in 2019 as part of WeWork’s post-IPO cost cutting.
In 2020, Rebekah bought back the curriculum from WeWork and quietly rebranded the concept as SOLFL. The program’s marketing materials emphasize nature, mindfulness and “soulful learning,” but for years its footprint remained largely conceptual: a website and occasional blog posts.
in El Portal
The first official hint of SOLFL’s plans came in April of last year, when then-village manager Christia Alou submitted a report to the council under the subheading “NE 2nd Avenue Business Corridor.” In a brief note, she wrote that the church property had changed ownership to SOLFL, and that the new owners planned a “new learning/school project” and had “applied and received a building permit to begin the development.”
By August, TOL Real Estate applied for a demolition permit for “office and professional buildings” on the site, which was approved in November, Miami-Dade County records show. SOLFL’s land use attorney Ben Fernandez sent a letter on Dec. 4 laying out the forthcoming school development. The letter detailed SOLFL’s site plan application and related zoning changes — including a special exception for school use, a comprehensive plan amendment and a rezoning of one single-family lot.
Still, Mayor Omarr Nickerson told residents he only learned of the project in December, when those applications landed, village residents Roman and Lucio said. The disconnect between paperwork moving through the village bureaucracy and elected officials’ awareness became a central talking point for opponents.
Nickerson and three of his colleagues did not respond to requests for comment. A fourth councilperson, Charles Winters, said the SOLFL plan has “generated strong opinions on both sides.”
“My focus is ensuring that decisions are based on the adopted code, documented analysis and enforceable conditions through the appropriate public channels,” he said.
While conducting due diligence on the church property, the SOLFL team learned that the current building is “obsolete, collapsing and any new owner will need to replace it,” Neumann’s spokesperson said.
“We have been engaging productively with the community for months with far more support than opposition,” the spokesperson added. “So it’s disappointing you are under a false impression about our efforts.”
SOLFL takes center stage
At the Dec. 9, 2025, village council meeting, the SOLFL team finally stepped into the spotlight.
“We are drawn to El Portal, not only for nature, but also for the people,” Lauren Koplowitz, SOLFL’s owner representative, said at the meeting. “And through our web of life curriculum, our students explore not only literacy, mathematics, science and language, but also nature, our local ecosystem, environmentalism and sustainability, thereby empowering our students to become environmental stewards and solutionists. This is why we feel El Portal is a perfect fit for our curriculum.”
She praised El Portal’s status as a bird sanctuary and its expansive tree canopy, and described the school’s backers as “a group of life loving, grateful, giving, soul-surfing, happy humans who are eager to be active members of the community.” The school’s campus would serve up to 350 tuition-paying students, according to a SOLFL presentation at a Dec. 9 village council meeting and filings with El Portal.
As residents peppered Koplowitz with questions about demolition, walls and traffic, the disconnect between the school’s branding and its physical impact came into sharper focus. The church building’s days were numbered. Neumann and his school representatives were pressing forward with tearing it down.
“So it’s an abandoned building that’s vacant with a chain link fence and a mesh thing around it, nothing to look at,” she said. “I mean, yes, the building happens to be beautiful, and we really tried to save it, that’s the truth. But nobody’s able to use the facilities as they are.”
The team is also proposing an 8-foot wall around the campus — a feature that neighbors deride as fortress-like, but that SOLFL characterizes as necessary for student safety. Plans on file show two-story, tiki hut-inspired buildings, with outdoor learning spaces and what Koplowitz described as farms and gardens to support a curriculum that includes selling produce at farmers markets.
Koplowitz also sought to distance the SOLFL site from the Little Farm redevelopment. “They’re actually two separate projects, and they’re actually two separate owners,” she said.
El Portal residents revolt
Koplowitz’s presentation only fueled opposition to the school project, which blew up into full-blown animosity against Neumann’s plans in El Portal by the time the first of two town halls was held on Feb. 12, after the demolition began.
During the town hall, when Koplowitz tried to explain that the work could not be paused because the hole-ridden building was now a “danger to the community,” a resident shot back: “Because of you!”
Lucio, the Preserve El Portal founder, and other residents described the tearing down of the church’s facade as a “punch to the face.”
“It was built in 1952 by Stewart and Skinner Associates, and that is the group behind the Miami Seaquarium, the Coral Gables Public Library, Coral Gables City Hall,” Lucio said. “This is a piece of not just El Portal history, but Miami history and architectural history.”
Greg Stier, one of Lucio’s neighbors, blasted what he called a stealth approval effort.
“This is the biggest project [in El Portal], and we get radio silence,” Stier said. “Another piece of El Portal history [is] being erased without so much as a whimper.”
Yet a smaller camp of neighbors such as Edelman, whose home is on the same residential street as the church property, have made an uneasy peace with SOLFL — less out of affection for Neumann and more out of fear of what could replace SOLFL under the state’s Live Local Act.
“Aesthetically, the school is a pleasing option,” Edelman said. She noted that Neumann and his representatives are offering concessions. The biggest so far is the developer’s decision to abandon plans to redevelop two single-story multifamily buildings that TOL Real Estate acquired in August and November for a combined $2.8 million. SOLFL previously planned to tear down those buildings on 90th Street and Northeast Second Avenue, about two blocks away from the church site, into an offsite parking lot for SOLFL’s staff.
SOLFL is also offering to build a pocket park near the church site, repave the side streets, pay salaries for two new police officers, add a sewer line on Northeast Second Avenue and throw in $100,000 annually to the village to help make up for lost property tax revenue since the school is a religious institution exempt from taxes, according to documents filed with the village.
Like New York City landlords negotiating leases with a bankrupt WeWork in 2023, some of the locals seem to understand that they are on the weak end of the power dynamic.
“Adam Neumann now is the largest landlord in El Portal,” Edelman said. “We want to work with him, not piss him off and have him put in Live Local everywhere. I do not want a Live Local monstrosity at the end of my street.”
Through their spokesperson, SOLFL and Neumann said they remain committed to the school project. “There have been efforts at convincing us to use the site for workforce housing that [is approved for] over 200,000 square feet, which is five times the size of the school,” the spokesperson said. “Obviously, our preference is for the school.”