Miami Beach

Miami Beach is the place on this roster where the question the shelf asks is answered for the whole town at once, and not by any hotel. The sand in front of every oceanfront house here is public beachfront the city manages, and the city grants a beachfront concession to the upland property owner alone, who may run it himself or contract it out. Between the houses and the water runs a nine-mile public promenade, open around the clock as a parks facility.

That is why the houses on this page stand in the same state as each other, and why none of them can stand in the state they would prefer. An oceanfront house in this town is the owner of the land behind the beach, servicing sand that belongs to the public under a municipal permit. The register records the loungers, the umbrellas, the butlers and the reserved sections, because those are real; it records them as an operation on public ground, because that is what the instrument says they are.

The gradations are worth reading, and they are gradations of arrangement rather than of right. At two of these addresses the public boardwalk physically separates the hotel grounds from the sand, so the guest crosses a public route to reach the water. At one the house is not a beachfront parcel at all but a tower inside its neighbour, holding a service footprint rather than a frontage. At another the same loungers on the same public sand are sold to the public by the day, which is the arrangement at its most literal.

The season here is somebody else's winter, named by its own calendar rather than by a closing date. Where a record carries no closing date, none is published, and the register says so. One address on this page is not a working house at all: it has been shut since 2017 and its hotel is announced for a later year, which the register prints rather than letting an address stand in for a building.