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N MIAMI CONDO NEWS — All About Condo Living in the Magic City — Edited by Heinz Dinter, PhD |
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Developer brings big plans, colorful past June 20, 2006 • A developer from Indiana is bringing fresh ideas, lots of money, and a quirky résumé to a landmark project abutting the new Miami Performing Arts Center — along with some questions about his past. Armed with one simple notion, plus the hundreds of millions of dollars his backers can deliver, Mark Siffin aims to alter downtown Miami’s future — if his own complicated past doesn’t get in the way. His notion: Downtown Miami has plenty of new condos. What it needs now is a sprawling, $370 million urban mall where the condo people can shop. Situated, happily, steps from the front door of the new Miami Performing Arts Center, Siffin’s Citisquare would be the centerpiece of a big new development on one of the biggest undeveloped tracts in downtown Miami, a critical piece of the district’s revitalization. Mark Alfred Siffin — college dropout, struggling artist, failed farmer, and now rich developer — didn’t schlep all the way here from Indiana for a bit role. He came to occupy center stage. And what a long, strange trip it’s been. Siffin, 55, tells of a life spent hopscotching the world, from early childhood in Thailand and Hawaii to fortuitous stops in Paris and Florence, and then on to Chicago and Los Angeles and, always, always, back to his native Bloomington. The résumé he outlines: In succession, an impoverished artist, a dealer in gemstones brassily secured in up-country Burma; a surfer, a farmer-turned-derivatives trader; and, finally, a successful Midwestern real-estate developer, with $3 billion tied up in several commercial projects across the country. “It's a matter of public record that I used drugs,” he said during a meandering three-hour interview at his rented bayfront Venetian Islands home, his base of operations in Miami while a nearby house he purchased last year for $2.6 million is renovated. “It is nothing that I am proud of.” His backers and business associates say they are untroubled by Siffin’s past. “He has consistently performed on every loan we have made to him,” said one of his principal bankers, Gwyneth Colburn of Brea, Calif.-based Fremont Investment & Loan, which has some $200 million on loan to Siffin’s company, Maefield Development, and wants to finance more, including the Miami project. The proposed Citisquare center, rising some 100 feet, would occupy two city blocks, now The Miami Herald parking lots, across North Bayshore Drive from the MPAC. The newspaper’s parent company, Knight-Ridder, has agreed to sell the lots and two other adjacent parcels — 10 acres in all — to local developer Terra Group and its partners for $190 million. Terra, which plans to build at least three condo towers on the property, brought in Maefield as a partner on the retail project. Terra’s David Martin said Siffin pitched the idea to his group, which had set out to build eight towers and no major retail. Siffin pushed to replace some of the contemplated condos with more than half a million square feet of stores and restaurants, said land broker Edie Laquer, who represents Knight-Ridder in the sale. Given the current slowdown in condo sales, Siffin’s idea was prescient, she said. “The best thing that ever happened to us and residents of Miami was Mark Siffin and his vision,” Laquer said. There is no question Siffin has emerged as an accomplished developer. Maefield Development — named after his daughter Mae, who is vice president for development — holds a broad portfolio of projects on each coast and the Midwest. He has a large-mixed use project in Southern California, shopping centers in Kansas City and Indianapolis, along with condos in South Florida. “He can be in my office on a Saturday afternoon and reach the CEO of, say, Borders on his cellphone on the golf course, and talk for half an hour,” said Bernardo Fort-Brescia a principal in the Miami firm Arquitectonica, which is designing Siffin’s Citisquare mall. Source: www.MiamiHerald.com.
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