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Ansins plan to move WSVN TV station from North Bay Village to Miramar, making way for new towers
Fox affiliate won site plan approval for about 70K sf in Miramar, amid a proposed massive mixed-use project
A photo illustration of Andrew Ansin along with renderings of the planned WSVN-TV Channel 7 television station in Miramar (front) as well as new towers planned for North Bay Village (back) (Getty, Sunbeam)
The billionaire Ansin family plans to move its WSVN-TV Channel 7 television station from North Bay Village to a new office site in Miramar. It would be part of a proposed massive mixed-use project at its industrial park in Broward County, The Real Deal has learned.
WSVN would vacate its prime property in North Bay Village, the small municipality along the 79th Street Causeway between Miami and Miami Beach, where planned high-rise residential developments abound — including those the Ansins will build.
The Miramar City Commission Wednesday night unanimously approved a site plan for a two-story, 71,272-square-foot office building that WSVN would occupy. The commission also approved a related plat waiver and conditional use application.
“We will be on-air from Miramar within three years, hopefully a little bit sooner,” Andrew Ansin told TRD on Thursday. Ansin is president of Sunbeam Television Corporation, the company that owns WSVN, and is a member of the Ansin family that controls Sunbeam and the land where the WSVN’s new home will be built.
Ansin also said his family’s real estate business is working on the site plan for a mixed-use development near WSVN’s future home that would have 2,800 apartments, a hotel, a public park, and 300,000 square feet of retail space, including an 80,000-square-foot grocery store, another 80,000 square feet for a large-format entertainment facility, and as much as 120,000 square feet for food and beverage businesses.
“It’s really critical. It’s a condition for our station to move [to Miramar] that our mixed-use project is approved,” Ansin said. “Our [WSVN] employees are used to being east-siders, so they’re used to having places to go. We need something to replace that on the west side of town … The idea is to build something you typically wouldn’t see in southwest Broward.”
WSVN’s move from northeast Miami-Dade County to southwest Broward County would put Channel 7 in the Miramar Park of Commerce, a business park with more than 5 million square feet of office and industrial space that the Ansin family developed, starting in 1984. Companies with a presence in the park include ADT, Federal Express, Humana, Neiman Marcus, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, and T-Mobile.
Channel 7’s future home is an 8-acre site along Mark’s Way, the south side of a 19.7-acre parcel on the southeast corner of Miramar Parkway and Red Road. Ansin-led Sunbeam Development Corporation acquired the parcel along with others for $14.3 million in 1999.
The WSVN project is Phase 5 in the development of the Miramar Park of Commerce, and Phase 6 will be the planned mixed-use development, which would unfold on about 100 acres on the northeast corner of Miramar Parkway and Red Road.
By November, the city commission is expected to consider a proposed site plan for the mixed-use development, which is scheduled to begin construction after the WSVN project breaks ground, Ansin said. “We should be in front of the commission in a couple of months,” he said.
In October of last year, the North Bay Village Commission narrowly approved a proposal by Ansin family’s Sunbeam Properties to build waterfront high-rises ranging in height from 450 feet to 650 feet on 13 acres the company owns in the village, including the current location of WSVN at 1401 79th Street Causeway and the former site of local radio station WIOD.