On a 1.5-mile sliver of Collins Avenue between Miami and the Broward County line, the glass towers run so tall they cast the beach in afternoon shadow. The doormen greet residents in Russian. The deli down the road stocks Baltika beer and vacuum-sealed pike. This is Sunny Isles Beach, and for thirty years the Russians in Sunny Isles Beach have given a former strip of vacation motels a second, stranger life as the place Florida calls Little Moscow.
The Place
Sunny Isles Beach is a barrier-island city of roughly 22,000 people, the 15th largest in Miami-Dade County, wedged between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway just north of Miami Beach. Its land was bought in 1920 by a developer named Harvey Baker Graves, who imagined a tropical resort, and for decades it was simply a sun-baked stretch of sand.
By the 1950s and 1960s it had become Motel Row, more than 30 themed motels along Collins Avenue where families drove down to vacation. The Ocean Palm, designed by Norman Giller in 1948, was the first two-storey motel in the United States. For a generation, this was a postcard idea of Florida: neon, shuffleboard, the smell of coconut oil on a public beach.
That postcard faded as the motels aged and Miami’s tourist trade drifted elsewhere. By the time the city looked for reinvention in the 1990s, the strip was tired, affordable and, crucially, oceanfront. It was the kind of bargain that a newly arrived immigrant could afford, and the kind of land a developer could dream very large on. Sunny Isles Beach would soon become both.
The motels are nearly all gone now. In their place stand some of the tallest, most expensive residential towers in the country, and behind a good many of their tinted windows live the émigrés who turned a retirement strip into something the rest of South Florida did not quite expect.
How It Became Russian
The Russians did not arrive in one wave. They came in two, decades apart, and the difference between them explains almost everything about the place today.
After the Wall
The first wave followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the borders of the former USSR opened, professionals, retirees and families from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Caucasus began arriving in Miami, and many of them found their way to the cheap, sunny, half-empty motels of Sunny Isles.
A great number of these early arrivals were Soviet Jews, part of the same emigration that built Russian-speaking enclaves across America. They came with professional degrees, modest savings and a determination to start again in a warm climate that felt nothing like the cities they had left.
By March 1997, the year the city was finally incorporated, the Sun Sentinel ran an article titled “Russian Emigres Find Opportunity in Sunny Isles.” Russian-language signs had begun appearing in storefronts. Shops changed hands. The newcomers were buying property and opening businesses, and the character of the strip was quietly shifting.
The City and the Towers
Sunny Isles Beach incorporated as a city in 1997, led by residents like Norman Edelcup, who had lived there since 1969 and petitioned for self-government. Incorporation gave the strip control over its own zoning, and zoning is what changed everything.
The motels were sold and demolished, replaced through the 2000s and 2010s by a forest of high-rise condominium towers. By 2025 the city counted roughly 36 of them, many exceeding 50 storeys. The Porsche Design Tower, completed in 2016, rose 60 storeys with car elevators that lift owners and their vehicles straight to their apartments.
The Money Arrives
This building boom coincided with the second wave: not émigrés starting over, but wealth looking for a safe harbour. Through the 2000s and 2010s, affluent Russian-speakers, including some who were genuinely rich, bought oceanfront condos as investments, second homes and places to store money far from Moscow.
In 2017, a Reuters investigation reported that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses had bought at least $98.4 million worth of property across seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida, several of them in Sunny Isles Beach. The nickname Little Moscow, which had grown organically over years much as Little Havana did, now carried a heavier connotation.
The two stories sat oddly together. On one block, a Soviet-Jewish family that had arrived with nothing in 1993 ran a small business and sent its children to American schools. A few blocks north, an anonymous shell company held a $5 million condo no one ever seemed to occupy. Both were the Russians of Sunny Isles, and the city learned to hold both truths at once.
The novelist Tom Wolfe noticed. Researching his 2012 novel Back to Blood, a book about money and identity in Miami, Wolfe spent time in these towers among the Russian-speaking rich.
What the Numbers Say
For all the talk of oligarchs, the everyday community is real and measurable. As of the 2010 census, just over 7 percent of Sunny Isles Beach residents were Russian-speakers, and roughly 9.4 percent claimed Russian ancestry. The 2015 to 2019 American Community Survey estimated about 1,079 Russian-born residents, more than any other city in Florida.
In the city’s southwest neighbourhood the concentration runs higher still: close to 18.9 percent Russian ancestry, with another 4.7 percent of Ukrainian descent. The Russian-speaking world of Sunny Isles has always been broader than Russia alone.
The Landmarks
Matryoshka Deli, 18100 Collins Avenue. Tucked into a strip plaza across from the Trump resort, Matryoshka is the community’s pantry: imported fish, cured meats, caviar, cheburek pastries, Baltika and Zhigulevskoye beer, and confections from Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus and Romania. After February 2022 it became something more, a rare neutral ground where Russian and Ukrainian neighbours still shopped side by side.
Trump International Beach Resort, 18001 Collins Avenue. A 32-storey oceanfront tower and one of the Trump-branded buildings named in the 2017 Reuters investigation into Russian property buyers. For years it was the most visible symbol of the money that flowed into Little Moscow.
Porsche Design Tower, 18555 Collins Avenue. Completed in 2016 and rising 60 storeys, this is the building with the car elevators, where residents ride up to their apartments alongside their cars. It is the purest expression of the wealth-storage Sunny Isles came to represent.
Acqualina Resort & Residences, 17875 Collins Avenue. A Five-Star, Five-Diamond resort spread across 4.5 beachfront acres, Acqualina anchors the south end of the strip. Its companion, the Estates at Acqualina at 17901 Collins Avenue, counts among the buildings said to house more billionaires than almost anywhere in South Florida.
The old Motel Row, along Collins Avenue. Almost nothing remains of the 30-plus motels that once defined the strip, but their ghost is everywhere in the city’s shape: a single avenue, hugging the ocean, built for people passing through who decided to stay.
St. Vladimir Russian Orthodox Church, Miami. Founded in 1947 and the oldest Russian Orthodox parish in South Florida, St. Vladimir sits in Miami proper, not on the island, but it remains a spiritual anchor for Orthodox families across the region, with a Saturday school teaching Russian language, literature and the Law of God.
Where They Came From
The label Russian flattens a far more tangled map. Many of the first arrivals were Soviet Jews, leaving cities like Moscow, Kyiv, Odesa, Minsk and Tbilisi during the great post-Soviet emigration, the same current that filled the Russian-speaking boardwalk of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn and the Russian streets of San Francisco’s Richmond District.
What bound them was language, not nationality. A resident of Little Moscow might be Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Georgian, Jewish or Orthodox or neither, and still call the same deli home. That breadth was the community’s quiet strength, and after 2022 it became its deepest fault line.
The later, wealthier wave came chiefly from Russia itself, drawn less by community than by climate, safety and a real-estate market happy to take their money. Florida’s Russian-speaking story, from the working families inland to the Jewish community of neighbouring Aventura and the retirees of Delray Beach, is wider than any single tower implies.
Sunny Isles Beach Today
The war in Ukraine changed Little Moscow in ways the towers cannot hide. After Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, sanctions fears rippled through the strip. Realtors described a market briefly on hold as buyers and sellers worked out what the new rules meant. Some wealthy Russian owners genuinely worried their condos might be seized.
The deeper damage was social. The war drove the Russian-speaking community apart. At Matryoshka, a Ukrainian customer named Mike Savchenko called the invasion “just plain wrong,” while a Russian shopper, Dimitry Gluzman, insisted Putin “did the right thing.” Children of the two nations argued in school hallways. Neighbours who had shared a language for thirty years stopped speaking.
And yet the community endures, complicated and unfinished. The deli still opens. The Orthodox school still meets on Saturdays. The towers still fill, increasingly with American buyers now, even as some Russian names quietly leave the registers. Sunny Isles Beach remains a place where the émigré dream and the geopolitics of a distant war live, uneasily, on the same beach.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Sunny Isles Beach called Little Moscow?
The nickname grew organically over the 1990s and 2000s as Russian-speaking immigrants settled the strip and, later, wealthy Russians bought up its luxury condos. The Russians in Sunny Isles Beach gave the city Russian-language signs, delis and services, and the name stuck much as Little Havana did for Miami’s Cuban quarter.
When did Russians move to Sunny Isles Beach?
The first significant wave came after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, with Russian-language shops noted by a March 1997 newspaper article. A second, wealthier wave of property buyers arrived through the 2000s and 2010s as the city’s high-rise condo towers were built.
How many Russians live in Sunny Isles Beach?
The 2015 to 2019 American Community Survey estimated about 1,079 Russian-born residents, the most of any city in Florida. As of the 2010 census, just over 7 percent of residents were Russian-speakers and roughly 9.4 percent claimed Russian ancestry, with higher concentrations in the southwest of the city.
Are the Russians in Sunny Isles Beach actually all Russian?
No. The Russian-speaking community includes many Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians and others from the former Soviet Union, and a large share of the early arrivals were Soviet Jews. The shared language, more than nationality, is what defines Little Moscow.
How did the war in Ukraine affect Sunny Isles Beach?
The 2022 invasion divided the community, with Russian and Ukrainian neighbours falling out and some wealthy Russian owners fearing their condos would be sanctioned or seized. The local real-estate market paused briefly, though American buyers increasingly filled the gap.
What Russian businesses and landmarks are in Sunny Isles Beach?
Matryoshka Deli at 18100 Collins Avenue is the community’s best-known Russian grocery, stocking imported Eastern European food. The strip’s famous towers, including the Trump International Beach Resort, Porsche Design Tower and Acqualina, became symbols of the wealth that flowed into Little Moscow.
If your family’s story passed through Sunny Isles 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 after the Wall came down, to a tower above Collins Avenue, to wherever you are now.