A residential development planned for Florida City will be partly funded through a Community Development District (CDD), according to recent filings by Zamora Corporation with Miami-Dade County and information on the project’s website. The proposed project, called Old Town Floridian, would be located at the northeast corner of Southwest 336th Street and Southwest 192nd Avenue/Tower Road. The 77.1-acre site is currently vacant and designated for agricultural use.
The Old Town Floridian is designed as a master-planned community featuring 178 villas, 160 townhomes, and 108 single-family homes. Plans indicate that the homes will be built around two existing lakes on the property.
CDDs are quasi-governmental entities created to finance infrastructure such as roads, water and sewer systems, sidewalks, and other essential components in large developments. These districts are managed by boards initially made up of developer representatives. CDDs typically issue bonds to fund construction costs; these bonds are repaid through special assessments that are first paid by the developer and later transferred to homebuyers.
Florida City commissioners approved the establishment of the Old Town Floridian CDD in 2020, followed by approval from Miami-Dade County commissioners in 2021. Capital improvements for the district are estimated at approximately $12 million. This includes $6.8 million allocated for roads, $2.6 million for sanitary collection systems, nearly $2 million for water connections, and $937,000 for stormwater management. The CDD intends to finance part of these costs through an $8.6 million bond issuance.
Rosa Zamora leads Zamora Corporation, according to official filings.
The use of CDDs has been common in Florida since the early 2000s, particularly for large suburban housing projects on the state’s west coast. Major homebuilders such as Lennar and D.R. Horton have used this financing model.
In South Florida, interest in CDDs has increased alongside a surge in large-scale development projects across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties. For example, developers Art Falcone and Nitin Motwani partnered with CIM Group to establish a CDD for Miami Worldcenter—a $6 billion downtown Miami project spanning ten blocks—which sold $74.1 million in tax-exempt bonds in 2017.
Similarly, Sunrise city commissioners approved a CDD in 2023 for Metropica—a planned development with over 3,000 residential units—allowing developer Joseph Kavana to issue up to $65 million in bonds for infrastructure improvements on part of the site. In another case within Sunrise, officials approved creation of a CDD to support infrastructure funding for Armando Codina and Jim Carr’s planned 900-home Solterra project.
