A vacant parcel just steps from Jackson Memorial Hospital is now home to construction crews building The Triangle, an eight-story, 112-unit apartment tower aimed at the tens of thousands of workers who staff Miami’s Health District every day. The project, backed financially by developer Daniel Dias, sits at 1750 NW 15th Street Road on a 0.7-acre site that a Dias-led entity picked up for $1.7 million, and it’s being built entirely under Florida’s Live Local Act.
According to The Real Deal, the $35 million project is the latest ground-up build from DFRE, the five-year-old, Miami-based firm founded by Dias in 2021 and now led alongside architect-by-training Laura Weinstein-Berman, who joined the company shortly after it launched. The Triangle will offer studios of about 450 square feet to tenants earning up to 120 percent of the area median income, the threshold set under the state’s workforce housing law. Per ODP Architects, which designed the building, the 131,000-square-foot tower will also include ground-floor retail, a 3,500-square-foot gym at street level, a 10,000-square-foot pool terrace on the fifth floor, and 72 parking spaces spread across four levels of structured parking.
A Health District Built for Its Own Workforce
The site sits inside the 153-acre Miami Health District, also called the Civic Center, which ranks as the nation’s second-largest medical district and includes Jackson Memorial Hospital, the University of Miami Health System, and the Miami VA Healthcare System — institutions that together employ roughly 46,000 workers, according to Highland Park Miami. That concentration of hospital staff, students, and administrators gives a project like The Triangle a built-in pool of potential tenants within walking distance of work.
The Real Deal’s report notes The Triangle is expected to be finished in early 2028, adding another data point to what remains a fairly short list of ground-up Live Local Act construction. Developers have filed a wave of Live Local applications over the past three years, but the same reporting from The Real Deal, written by Lidia Dinkova, describes actual groundbreakings as relatively rare — with many projects instead converting completed market-rate buildings into workforce housing or targeting office-to-residential redevelopment rather than building from scratch.
DFRE’s Track Record Around Miami
DFRE has built a portfolio that reaches beyond the Health District into industrial, retail, hospitality, and workforce housing, and the firm says it holds onto and manages its own buildings for the long term rather than flipping them. Its résumé includes El Jardin, an adaptive reuse project in Little Havana that’s now open, and 1536 Health District, a 40-unit workforce project built on a 5,400-square-foot lot that’s also open today. The company additionally operates Gold Lake Industrial in Medley and brought Peach on 14th, a live-work project in Overtown with three units, into its portfolio…