On a humid morning along South Ocean Drive, the lobby of a 1,298-unit condominium tower fills with the soft consonants of Russian. A grandmother corrals two children toward the pool. A man in linen reads a phone in Cyrillic over an espresso. This is the everyday texture of the Russians in Hallandale Beach, a community that spilled north across the Miami-Dade line from Sunny Isles’ famous “Little Moscow” and quietly made the southern edge of Broward County its own.
The Place
Hallandale Beach sits at the very bottom of Broward County, pressed between Hollywood to the north and Aventura, in Miami-Dade, to the south. The Atlantic forms its eastern wall; the city covers barely 4.6 square miles. It was named for Luther Halland, the son of a Swedish worker on Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway, and incorporated in 1927.
For most of the twentieth century it was a winter town of low motels, a racetrack, and Canadian snowbirds. Today its oceanfront is a wall of towers, and a meaningful share of the people inside them came from the former Soviet Union.
How It Became Russian
The Soviet collapse and the first arrivals
The story does not start in Hallandale Beach. It starts one mile south, in Sunny Isles Beach. After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, emigrants from Russia, Ukraine, and the other post-Soviet republics began arriving in northern Miami-Dade. By 1997, the year Sunny Isles incorporated, Russian-language signs and shops were appearing fast enough that a Sun Sentinel reporter recorded émigrés already calling the strip “Little Moscow.”
Sunny Isles filled first because it was cheap and on the water, a row of faded motels waiting to be replaced. As prices climbed and the towers went up, families looked for somewhere a little more affordable, a little more residential, still walking distance to the same delis and the same beach. The county line was no barrier. They crossed it.
Two migrations, not one
It helps to see this as two overlapping waves. The first was a working migration: hairdressers, drivers, builders, restaurant staff, and small-business owners who, as the Miami historian Paul George put it, became “in many ways, the hospitality industry” of the beach. They needed homes, and Hallandale’s older mid-rise condos were within reach.
The second was a capital migration. Wealthy Russians bought oceanfront units, often through corporations rather than their own names, as a place to keep money safe. Many of those apartments stayed dark for years, the so-called “ghost condos.” The two waves shared a coastline and a language and very little else.
Why Hallandale, specifically
Hallandale offered three things Sunny Isles increasingly did not. Lower prices, for one, in its inland and bay-facing buildings. Space, for another: the Three Islands development on the Intracoastal gave families low-rise towers, parks, and tennis courts a short drive from the ocean. And proximity. The Russian grocers, bakeries, and doctors clustered along Collins Avenue at the top of Sunny Isles were a few minutes south.
The result is one of the most concentrated post-Soviet neighbourhoods in the country. In the Three Islands neighbourhood, more residents claim Ukrainian ancestry, about 17 percent, than in almost any neighbourhood in America, and the share who speak Russian at home is higher than in more than 99 percent of US neighbourhoods. Citywide, Hallandale Beach reports roughly 6 to 7 percent Russian ancestry and another 3 to 4 percent Ukrainian, unusually high figures for a small Florida city.
A shared corridor with Sunny Isles and Aventura
To understand Hallandale you have to read it together with its neighbours. The Russian-speaking world here runs as a single corridor down Collins Avenue and the parallel ocean drive, through the towers of Sunny Isles, and into the condos and synagogues just south in Aventura. People live in one city, shop in another, and pray in a third without ever feeling they have left home.
That corridor is why this small Broward city carries a Russian character far larger than its borders. The community here is the northern wing of something that began on the beach a mile away. For the émigré half of that story by the bay, see our profile of the Russian community in Sunny Isles Beach, the original “Little Moscow.”
The deli, the bakery, the doctor
What made the corridor sticky was the small infrastructure of daily life. A grocer where the labels are in Cyrillic and the buffet holds blini, herring, smoked fish, and Georgian wine. A bakery for black bread and napoleon cake. A Russian-speaking dentist, accountant, and travel agent. Once those existed, you could, as longtime residents say, get by without a word of English. The community became self-sustaining, and self-sustaining communities grow.
The Landmarks
The Hemispheres, 1985 South Ocean Drive. A 1,298-unit oceanfront complex sitting yards north of the Broward-Miami-Dade line, it is one of the city’s great vertical villages. Its lobbies and pool decks are among the most reliably Russian-speaking public spaces in Hallandale, a place where the corridor’s residential life is most visible.
Three Islands. A planned waterfront neighbourhood of low-rise towers, townhouses, parks, and tennis courts wrapped by the Intracoastal. It holds one of the highest concentrations of Ukrainian and Russian-speaking residents in the United States, and is the family heart of the community, quieter and greener than the oceanfront.
Kalinka Russian-European Delicatessen, 18090 Collins Avenue. Just over the line in Sunny Isles but the everyday pantry for Hallandale’s families, Kalinka is a deli-and-grocery of the old émigré kind: sausage, herring, dumplings, and a glass case of cakes, with staff who switch between Russian and English mid-sentence.
Matryoshka Deli-Food, 18100 Collins Avenue. A few doors from Kalinka, Matryoshka pairs a stocked grocery with a labelled buffet of entrées and pastries drawn from Russia, Belarus, and beyond. For many Hallandale residents the weekly run south to this stretch of Collins is the closest thing the community has to a market square.
Chabad Russian Center of South Florida. Founded in Sunny Isles in September 2003, this centre serves the Russian-speaking Jewish population across the corridor, including Hallandale, with a preschool, Hebrew school, teen and adult programmes, and services conducted with the community’s own language and customs in mind.
Gulfstream Park and the Village, 501 South Federal Highway. The thoroughbred racetrack opened on 1 February 1939 and remade Hallandale’s economy. In 2010 a 500,000-square-foot open-air shopping village rose beside it, crowned by the colossal bronze of Pegasus. It is the city’s main gathering place, where the corridor’s residents shop and dine alongside everyone else.
Hallandale Beach. The public sand at the foot of the towers is the simplest landmark of all, and the reason any of this exists. The whole corridor, working families and ghost-condo investors alike, came for the same warm Atlantic that the older motels once advertised to Canadians.
Where They Came From
The community traces back chiefly to Russia, Ukraine, and the wider former Soviet Union: Moscow and St Petersburg, but also Kyiv, Odesa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, including the Bukharian and Russian-speaking Jewish worlds. Many arrived after 1991 directly; others came south after a first stop in New York’s post-Soviet capital.
That northern connection is direct and personal. A great many Hallandale families have relatives in or roots through Brooklyn, the cold-weather mirror of this sunny strip. You can read that founding chapter in our profile of the Russian community in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
The reasons for choosing South Florida were the ordinary ones of any sun migration: warmth, the ocean, lower taxes, and the comfort of landing where the shops, doctors, and neighbours already spoke your language. The Russian-speaking Jewish strand overlapped heavily with the established Jewish communities just south, such as the one we describe among the Jews of Aventura and, further up the coast, the Jews of Delray Beach.
Hallandale Beach Today
The community today is real, settled, and quieter than the headlines suggest. The everyday version of it, the families in Three Islands and the Hemispheres, the runs to the Collins Avenue delis, the Russian-speaking dentist and accountant, has not gone anywhere. It is woven into the ordinary life of a small beach city.
The investor version is more complicated. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the corridor braced for sanctions and a sell-off, and the fears of the area’s wealthiest Russians made national news. What largely happened instead, real-estate observers noted, was continued buying, often through corporate names, as money looked for somewhere to sit. Some oligarch-linked units remain hard to trace, and a few quietly changed hands, but the wholesale exodus many predicted did not arrive.
The war did reshape the human community, though, in ways a census is slow to catch. “Russian-speaking” and “Russian” are not the same thing, and they never were less so than now. Ukrainian families who once shared the corridor comfortably with Russian neighbours carry the weight of the war into the lobby and the deli queue. The shared language remains; the shared ease, in places, has frayed. To describe Hallandale honestly today is to hold both truths at once: a durable, ordinary immigrant neighbourhood, and a community living through a rupture in its old country that has not yet finished.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there really a Russian community in Hallandale Beach, Florida?
Yes. The Russians in Hallandale Beach are part of a Russian-speaking corridor that runs down the coast from Sunny Isles Beach. The city reports roughly 6 to 7 percent Russian ancestry, and its Three Islands neighbourhood has one of the highest concentrations of Russian-speaking and Ukrainian residents in the country.
Why did Russians settle in Hallandale Beach?
They spread north from Sunny Isles’ “Little Moscow” after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, drawn by lower condo prices, the family-friendly Three Islands neighbourhood, and proximity to the Russian grocers and services along Collins Avenue. The warm Atlantic and Florida’s low taxes did the rest.
What is the difference between Hallandale Beach and Sunny Isles “Little Moscow”?
Sunny Isles Beach, just south across the Miami-Dade line, is where the post-Soviet community first concentrated and earned the “Little Moscow” nickname in the 1990s. Hallandale Beach is the Broward extension of that same corridor, generally more residential and slightly more affordable, sharing the same shops and institutions.
Where do Russians in Hallandale Beach shop for food?
Most rely on the Russian-European delis and groceries clustered at the top of Collins Avenue, such as Kalinka at 18090 Collins and Matryoshka at 18100 Collins, both a short drive south. They stock sausage, herring, smoked fish, black bread, cakes, and Georgian wine.
How did the 2022 war in Ukraine affect the community?
Predictions of a mass sell-off of Russian-owned condos mostly did not materialise; buying continued, often through corporate names. The deeper change was social: Ukrainian and Russian residents who once shared the corridor easily now live alongside the weight of the war, even as they keep a common language.
What are the main landmarks of the Russian community in Hallandale Beach?
Key sites include the Hemispheres towers on South Ocean Drive, the Three Islands neighbourhood, the Kalinka and Matryoshka delis on Collins Avenue, the Chabad Russian Center, and Gulfstream Park, the racetrack and shopping village that anchors the city.
If your family’s story passed through Hallandale Beach, or any of the places Russians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Moscow or Odesa apartment, to a Brooklyn winter, to a tower above the Atlantic in Hallandale Beach, to wherever you are now.