At the height of the housing market, developers rushed to secure permits to build condos on the Miami River. Most found fierce opposition that doomed their plans. Neighbors and the marine industry sued to block projects, and some developers missed the peak of the market and ended up losing their undeveloped sites to foreclosure.

But that isn’t the luck of attorney-turned-developer Andy Hellinger, who just got city approval to build one of the largest mixed-use projects on the river.