In Your Face, Chicago: Miami Second Among U.S. Cities in High-Rise Construction

Have you been driving through downtown Miami lately, searching in vain for a parking spot that won't cost you a hundred dollars for four hours, only to find yourself staring up through your windshield and thinking to yourself, "Are there a lot of new skyscrapers, or is it just me," before rear-ending a UPS truck? Well, we have good news for you. Not for your car, unfortunately; that thing is totaled. But hey, you were right about the skyscrapers.

Turns out that, in the last 10 years, high-rise construction in the Magic City is second only to New York.

That's according to a study done by McGraw-Hill Dodge and recently released in the Architectural Record. With 145 building projects of 20-plus stories started between 2000 and 2011, only New York had more high rises added to its skyline. Granted, New York boasts a whopping 331 really tall buildings going up in the last decade, but still, the number is a testament to Miami's incredible real estate boom and bust cycle.

The height supremacy unfortunately doesn't extend into individual projects, as Miami isn't in the top five when it comes to tallest buildings started in the United States since 2000.

New York, once again hogging all the attention, is first, and Chicago sits second, further fueling that city's New York inferiority complex.

Miami should break into the top five once One Bayfront Plaza is completed, as that building is expected to rise to 1,010 feet and 80 floors. But One Bayfront Plaza likely won't be done until 2018, leaving south Florida shut out of America's tallest tower conversation for now.

(Unless some supervillain concocts a maniacal plan to steal the Sears Tower and plop it next to American Airlines Arena, thus making Miami king of the high-rise cities. Not that we're suggesting that, of course.)

The buildings may be rising, but as you're probably aware, the South Florida real estate crash in 2007 put a hurting on a lot of those projects. Things have been looking up in the city's real estate market lately, especially in the condo market, where analysts believe a growth phase has started.

According to a recent Miami Herald report, 45 condominium towers have been planned and developed in the last 14 months, with five already under construction. That despite a lot of leftover condo towers from the last real estate boom.

Driving those high-rises: foreign investment, especially from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, because there's no better way to spend your hard-earned cash like buying a huge glass tower with an ocean view in a country in which you don't live.

So what does this mean for the Miami real-estate market? Aside from an ever taller skyline, it's too soon to tell. After all, it was only a few years ago that the last condo construction crane in downtown Miami was taken down. But the fact that developers are once again starting to put up big buildings suggests that some kind of positive turnaround is in the offing.

Check out the Architectural Record's graphic on all the data here:

(H/T to Curbed Miami)

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