Former El Portal Trailer Park Site Sold to WeWork Founder's Miami Company for $70.5M

Back in 2015, residents of the Little Farm Trailer Park in El Portal learned that their tight-knit community had been sold from beneath them.

Owners of the park swiftly ousted residents from the 16-acre low-income community situated just off Biscayne Boulevard, leaving many of them homeless. The owners demolished the park soon after. It was one of Miami’s most sweeping evictions in decades, and a clear example of the real-estate transformation and gentrification that have swallowed the city for years.

But while the land has sat empty for almost the past decade, there now appear to be new plans for it.

On Tuesday, a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge approved the sale of the lot at 8500 Biscayne Boulevard to the Miami-based Flow, a real estate company founded by former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann. Launched in 2022 following the precipitous downfall of Neumann's office-space startup WeWork, Flow snapped up the land for $70.5 million.

While the property is zoned for a three-million-square-foot mixed-use project and approved for 150 apartments per acre — meaning a developer could build up to around 2,400 units — it remains unclear what Flow plans to do with it.

A spokesperson for Flow didn't respond to New Times' inquiries about the company's plans for the site and why it targeted this particular swath of land.

"We’re excited about the opportunity to collaborate with the local community and unlock the full potential of these remarkable 16 acres in Miami," a Flow spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

Previously known as the Little Farm Trailer Park, the site has sat vacant since 2016 when the Village of El Portal and the park's previous owners, led by Fu Jing "Leo" Wu, settled a lawsuit brought by 45 trailer residents by paying them $8,000 each for relocation costs, according to the Real Deal. Wu also managed a company that owned the former federal immigration building on Biscayne Boulevard (which, too, has been abandoned for years, but that's another story).
In 2020, a group of foreign investors sued the previous owners of both the trailer park and the immigration tower, alleging that Florida Fullview Immigration Building, its manager Wu, and other affiliates defrauded more than $50 million from 99 investors seeking permanent U.S. residency through the federal government’s EB-5 visa program.

In a settlement agreement, Wu agreed to give up the two development sites in exchange for receiving $5 million from the proceeds of the sale of both properties. The former trailer park site subsequently landed in court receivership, which is when a piece of property is tied up in litigation and the court appoints a neutral third party to manage it.

Aside from navigating legal obstacles over the years, the land has also faced environmental woes — specifically, septic tank overflows and sewage problems, largely due to the village's reliance on septic tanks to dispose of waste.

While El Portal mayor Omarr Nickerson told the Washington Post last May that he was working to end his community’s reliance on septic systems, the solution isn't cheap. He estimates it would cost roughly $50 million to convert El Portal's homes to the municipal sewer system.