The project itself carries a total development cost of $125.5 million. Assouline-Busch bought the site at 3010 Collins Ave, formerly the 110-key Red South Beach building, for $33 million in 2022. When it opens in 2027, The Monroe will offer 15 suites ranging from 488 to 1,257 square feet, a 5,000-square-foot restaurant, a rooftop bar, an event venue, a recording studio, a spa and private beach services managed by Boucher Brothers.
The most unfamiliar piece of that stack to anyone outside commercial real estate finance is almost certainly the largest one: the $44 million in C-PACE financing, which alone covers more than a third of total project cost. C-PACE, short for Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy, lets a property owner finance qualifying energy efficiency, water conservation and resiliency upgrades through a long-term assessment attached directly to the property’s tax bill rather than through a conventional loan. Because it’s repaid as a tax assessment rather than structured as debt against the borrower, C-PACE financing is long-term, fixed-rate and non-recourse, meaning it attaches to the property itself and can’t be accelerated the way a traditional loan can if the borrower runs into trouble elsewhere. Cumulative C-PACE originations hit a record roughly $13 billion nationally in 2025, and the financing tool is now active in 40 states.
Historic hotel redevelopments have become one of the strongest use cases for C-PACE specifically, according to real estate law firm Mintz, because older buildings being converted into modern hospitality properties typically require exactly the kind of substantial HVAC, lighting, water and energy-system overhauls that qualify for the program. The Monroe’s C-PACE piece is far from the largest such deal on record, Mintz’s own attorneys pointed to a $223 million C-PACE financing from the same lender, Nuveen Green Capital, on the redevelopment of Nevada’s historic Cal Neva Hotel into the Lake Tahoe Proper Resort and Casino, but it illustrates the same underlying pattern: C-PACE increasingly functions as a primary capital source on historic hospitality redevelopments, not a minor supplement to a conventional construction loan…