Where to live in Miami
Miami is thirty-six square miles inside a county of thirty-four municipalities, and almost everything written about it describes something else. What shapes an address here is not a quadrant grid: the City's own puts Brickell, Little Havana and Coconut Grove in the same one, but the Miami River, Biscayne Bay, and a limestone ridge whose few feet of elevation decide your flood zone and therefore your insurance. These are 13 neighborhood guides, filterable by area below.
Where to start looking in Miami
Most people arrive with one constraint rather than a map. Each line below names one, one place to begin, and the figure behind it, which comes from the guide the line points at.
- To know what the tax line will be. A City of Miami address paid 19.9878 mills in 2025. An unincorporated Miami-Dade address a few blocks away paid 16.9317, and the Coral Gables side of a Coral Way street paid 18.1852. Flagami sits against that western boundary.
- To commute without a car. Allapattah has three Metrorail stations inside the NET area: Allapattah, Santa Clara and Civic Center. In Brickell the Metromover loop is free.
- A single-family house and a yard. Flagami, 52.6% owner-occupied and zoned T3-O, the lowest-intensity transect in the Miami 21 code.
- To be on the water, and to know the cost of it. Edgewater sits 6.5 feet above sea level, and 212 of its buildings are on the City's 40-year recertification list, 45 of them still pending, at a median construction year of 1938.
- The highest ground. Coconut Grove at 16.4 feet, or Little Haiti at 12.8. Brickell is 5.9.
- The oldest housing stock. Coral Way, where the median home in the reference tract was built in 1954. In Downtown Miami it is 2010.
Browse dedicated guides for Downtown, Brickell and the river mouth, Little Havana and west Miami, Coconut Grove, Coral Way and the south, Wynwood and north of the river.
13 communities across the city
A guide to every NET service area the City of Miami runs, across thirty-six square miles. The neighborhoods people actually name when they say where they live here. Filter by area, then page through the rest.
Allapattah
The Dominican and Central American center of the city north of the river, wrapped around the Civic Center hospital district and the produce terminal, and the last Metrorail-served Miami neighborhood still priced below the bay.
Brickell
The densest square mile in Florida, almost entirely built since 2003, and where the condominium arithmetic the rest of this site keeps flagging actually bites.
Coconut Grove
Older than the city that annexed it, sixteen feet up on the Miami Rock Ridge, and the one neighborhood here where tree canopy rather than air conditioning shapes the summer.
Coral Way
Banyan canopy over 1920s Mediterranean Revival on the Miami Rock Ridge, and the closest thing the city has to a single-family suburb inside its own limits.
Downtown Miami
The half of the Downtown/Brickell NET area north of the river, where Government Center, the courts and Flagler Street sit above a residential population that has roughly doubled since 2010.
Edgewater
A half-mile of bayfront towers between Wynwood and the Julia Tuttle Causeway, the fastest-building part of Miami and among the lowest-lying.
Flagami
The city's western edge, split by Flagler Street and bounded by the Tamiami Trail, a grid of post-war single-family houses that is the lowest-density and highest-ownership part of Miami.
Liberty City
The neighborhood the City files as the Model City NET area, built around Liberty Square, the first public housing built in the American South for Black residents, and now being rebuilt in place.
Little Haiti
Lemon City renamed, the largest Haitian community outside Haiti, and the place where Miami's argument about elevation and displacement is loudest because it sits high on the ridge.
Little Havana
The cheapest housing inside the city limits and the lowest ownership rate, with a National Treasure designation and an upzoning fight arguing over both.
Overtown
Colored Town as the 1896 city charter zoned it, cut in half by I-95 in the 1960s, and the historically Black neighborhood now closest to a downtown expanding into it.
Upper Eastside
Four miles of Biscayne Boulevard motels and bayfront blocks north of the Julia Tuttle, protected as the MiMo Biscayne Boulevard Historic District and the only part of Miami where mid-century modern is the regulated style.
Photographs: Former Weinkle Grocery & Market Allapattah 1926 by Phillip Pessar from Miami, USA, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons · Southside Elementary School Miami by PhillipPessar, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Coconut Grove by Gary Miotla, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Coral Way by Averette, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Real Estate Building (Miami, Florida) by Tamanoeconomico, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Bacardi Building Biscayne Boulevard Miami Florida by PhillipPessar, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · The city from the water by P. Hughes, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · North of the river by Paul Sableman, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons · A street in Little Haiti by Paolo Gamba, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons · Architectural Detail Little Havana Apartment Building 1925 by Phillip Pessar, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons · Miami FL Overtown St. John Institutional Missionary Baptist Church by Pietro, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Little River, Miami, FL, USA by Sebastian Carlosena, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
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Showing 1–12 of 13 communities
The four areas at a glance
Six feet is the mean elevation of this city, and a difference of three or four feet inside it is the difference between a mapped flood zone and no mapped flood zone, which is to say between an insurance quote you can live with and one you cannot. The Miami Rock Ridge runs south through the Grove and Coral Way and north through Little Haiti and Liberty City; the bayfront on either side of it does not. That, rather than distance from downtown, is the pattern every price on these pages sits downstream of.
| Area | Neighborhoods | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown, Brickell and the river mouth | Brickell, Downtown Miami, Overtown | Either side of the mouth of the Miami River: a business district that acquired residents, and the densest square mile in Florida directly across the water from it. |
| Little Havana and west Miami | Allapattah, Flagami, Little Havana | West of the river, on the flat inland ground. The cheapest housing inside the city limits, the lowest ownership rate, and the neighborhood most people picture when they picture Miami. |
| Coconut Grove, Coral Way and the south | Coconut Grove, Coral Way | South along the bay and the ridge behind it. The Grove predates the city that annexed it, and this is the highest ground Miami has. |
| Wynwood and north of the river | Edgewater, Liberty City, Little Haiti, Upper Eastside, Wynwood | North of the river, where warehouses have been turning into housing since a 2015 rezoning, and where the city's sharpest arguments about who that housing is for are happening. |
The four areas above are ours; the neighborhoods are not. The City of Miami publishes eleven NET (Neighborhood Enhancement Team) service areas: real administrative districts with an office and a staff apiece, and publishes nothing above them. There is a guide to every one of them, 13 in all, because two of the areas carry two names apiece and each half gets its own page. The City also maintains an address quadrant grid off Flagler Street and Miami Avenue that appears on every street sign, and that grid is useless here: its origin puts Brickell, Little Havana and Coconut Grove in the same quadrant. So the grouping is editorial, built from the river and the ridge, and each guide takes its map point from the OpenStreetMap place node for the name rather than from a NET polygon: a service district is not a neighborhood, and Brickell sits inside the Downtown NET area.
What is not here, and where it is instead. Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Hialeah, Key Biscayne, Doral, Aventura, Miami Shores and North Miami are separate cities, not Miami neighborhoods: they have their own councils and their own tax rates, and they are on the Miami-Dade comparison instead. Kendall, Westchester, The Hammocks, Fontainebleau and Country Walk are unincorporated county: no municipal government, no row on that table, and no guide here. More than half of Miami-Dade lives that way. Inside the city limits the NET areas do not name everything either. The Roads, Shenandoah, Silver Bluff, Morningside, Spring Garden and Grapeland Heights sit inside larger areas and have no page of their own.