Avenues The World School “indefinitely suspended” its planned development of a $180 million private school campus in Miami, more than five years after acquiring the site.
A lack of demand for an elite private school like Avenues wasn’t the issue. Top private schools across South Florida have reported long wait lists for enrollment, with private school acceptance becoming a condition for home purchases and job acceptances.
A spokesperson for Avenues confirmed to Bloomberg that plans were on hold. The 15.7-acre site at 4949 Northeast Second Avenue in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood has been rumored to be for sale for months.
“While there were parents who had expressed interest in Avenues Miami, admissions for the campus had not yet started as it was still early in the process,” the spokesperson told The Real Deal. “We are currently evaluating options for the site but it has not been listed for sale at this time.”
In late 2018, Ave FL I Operating LLC, a Delaware entity linked to Gap Chairman Robert Fisher’s family office, paid $60 million for the property that was previously home to Archbishop Curley Notre-Dame High School, with plans to bring Avenues to the site.
The Miami campus was set to include a 219,000-square-foot school for about 2,400 students with a 179-unit dormitory, education from day care to high school, a gym and pool complex and a garage, records show. A water and sewer agreement shows the school was set to open for the 2022-2023 year.
Last year, Avenues announced it planned to sell its schools in New York and São Paulo to Nord Anglia Education so that it could continue expanding, the schools’ spokesperson said.
The huge migration of wealth to South Florida, driven in part by companies expanding or relocating to the region, has put pressure on existing private schools. In Miami-Dade County, top schools include Miami Country Day, where tuition reaches nearly $50,000 a year for high school students; Ransom Everglades School; Gulliver Preparatory Academy and Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart. Tuition at Avenues would likely have been in the same range.
Archbishop Curley Notre-Dame closed in 2016. Triple Five Group, which plans to develop the long-delayed American Dream mega-mall in Miami, was originally reported to be under contract to buy the property, before it sold to the Fisher entity in 2018.
Cushman & Wakefield sued Avenues in 2019 over allegedly unpaid commissions tied to the sale. That lawsuit was settled a year later, court records show.
The site is north of the Miami Design District and just west of Miami’s waterfront Bay Point neighborhood, where home prices have reached record levels since the pandemic.
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