{"id":191233,"date":"2026-03-14T07:12:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T07:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/191233\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T07:12:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T07:12:07","slug":"restaurateur-builds-affordable-housing-in-miami-for-his-employees-nbc-6-south-florida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/191233\/","title":{"rendered":"Restaurateur builds affordable housing in Miami for his employees \u2013 NBC 6 South Florida"},"content":{"rendered":"

He calls it the Kush corner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a construction site where crews are renovating the historic building at the corner of North Miami Avenue and NE 20th\u00a0Street in Wynwood. That\u2019s where Matt Kuscher is rebuilding Kush restaurant, which closed a couple of years ago, and to literally top it off, he\u2019s creating 10 studio apartments upstairs. They will be affordable housing units reserved for hospitality industry workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCentrally located so you can work in Wynwood, so hopefully, all my employees are walking to work and living an amazing life,\u201d Kuscher said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wynwood is booming with construction sites. South Florida in general is booming, but Kuscher says too many people are on the outside looking in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, we\u2019re building, building, building, and all the employees have nowhere to live because they\u2019re getting priced out,\u201d Kuscher said.<\/p>\n

Veteran food writer Carlos Frias first reported Kuscher\u2019s plan on his site,\u00a0carlosfrias.com<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is providing housing for people that are going to live and work in this area,\u201d Frias said.<\/p>\n

The idea is unique and fills a void.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve heard stories of people who are living in Hialeah and taking a series of buses and bus systems to get to Miami Beach to work in the hotel industry, right, and then back, and we\u2019re talking about hours, two, three hours of someone\u2019s life just evaporating in a commute, something like this eliminates that.\u201d Frias said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m hoping to start a movement and be the king of affordable housing and restaurant mix-use here in Miami. I want Kush and I want affordable housing to go hand in hand together,\u201d Kuscher said, adding that he has plans to replicate this project in other sites.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Omni Community Redevelopment Agency played an integral role in getting the plan off the ground. The CRA invested in the project, and in return, Kuscher signed a contract to keep Kush there and to keep the apartments affordable for the next 50 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the building was set to be demolished and the reality is, I\u2019m a romantic at heart and I wanted to keep the soul of Wynwood, that building has so much history, it\u2019s a hundred years old, Whitey Bulger used to live up there,\u201d Kuscher explained. \u201cIt was a brothel for 30 years where you just buy your drink here and go upstairs to the apartments where they were so a little Miami culture, a little magic city.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new Kush restaurant and the apartments should be ready to go in about three months. The brothel, however, will remain a relic of history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He calls it the Kush corner.\u00a0 It\u2019s a construction site where crews are renovating the historic building at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191234,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,125,124,309],"class_list":["post-191233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-wynwood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191233\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}