Zamora Seeks Community Development District in Florida City

A residential project with 446 homes in Florida City will be partly financed through a Community Development District.

Zamora Corporation proposed the Old Town Floridian CDD on the northeast corner of Southwest 336th Street and Southwest 192nd Avenue/Tower Road, according to Zamora’s filings to Miami-Dade County and the project’s website. The site, which is vacant and has an agricultural land-use designation, spans 77.1 acres.

The master-planned Old Town Floridian would consist of 178 villas, 160 townhomes and 108 single-family homes, according to the filings. Site plans show the homes would surround the pair of existing lakes on the site.

CDDs are quasi-governmental agencies installed to help pay for the construction and maintenance of roads, water and sewer pipes, sidewalks and other infrastructure at massive developments. Overseen by boards, which at first consist of representatives of the developer, CDDs issue bonds that are repaid by special assessments, initially paid for by the developer and then passed on to homebuyers.

Florida City commissioners approved the Old Town Floridian CDD in 2020, and Miami-Dade commissioners greenlit it in 2021, according to the CDD’s February board meeting filing.

Capital improvements for the district are expected to cost roughly $12 million, including $6.8 million for roads, $2.6 million for sanitary collection, nearly $2 million for water connections and $937,000 for stormwater management, the meeting filing shows. The CDD plans to finance this partly by issuing an $8.6 million bond.

Zamora is led by Rosa Zamora, the filing shows.

Developers have used CDDs in Florida since the early 2000s primarily for sprawling suburban housing projects along the state’s west coast. Lennar and D.R. Horton are among the homebuilders that use CDDs.

The financing structure has gained more traction in South Florida in recent years, amid a development boom in the tri-county region with large projects. Miami Worldcenter’s master developers, Art Falcone and Nitin Motwani, in partnership with Los Angeles-based CIM Group, created a CDD for the $6 billion project that spans 10 blocks in downtown Miami. In 2017, the CDD sold $74.1 million in tax exempt bonds.

In 2023, Sunrise commissioners approved a Community Development District for Metropica, a planned 64-acre master-planned project at 1800 Northwest 136th Street in Sunrise with 3,300 residential high-rise units. Through the CDD, developer Joseph Kavana can issue up to $65 million in bonds for infrastructure improvements and services for a 50-acre portion of the site.

Also in Sunrise, the city approved the creation of the Solterra Community Development District, which would finance infrastructure for developers Armando Codina and Jim Carr’s planned 900-home project at 7400 Northwest 24th Place.