Businesses adapt to Miami Beach rules against spring break violence
Businesses adapt to Miami Beach rules against spring break violence
We’re in the thick of spring break travel, and Miami Beach has long been a hot spot for student revelers. In recent years though, the annual party scene in March has escalated into stampedes and even fatal shootings. After pressure from residents and bad publicity, officials have announced they’re over the chaos.
The city has implemented a number of rules to keep tourists and residents safe. The strict rules in Miami Beach will be in place through March, and — over the next two weekends specifically — police will institute DUI checkpoints and run license plates to screen for previous criminal offenders.
The idea is to deter large, rowdy crowds with security checkpoints at popular beach entrances and high fees for weekend parking. Two city garages, for instance, will charge up to $100 a day.
The restaurants of the Art Deco hotels also have to shut down their sidewalk seating on the main drag in South Beach.
Holding back tourists though, could hurt local businesses that count on spring break for big profits. These include those forbidden from renting out vehicles like electric bikes, scooters or mopeds.
“We just gotta work with what we’ve got,” said Antonio Prades, who manages a store called Fly E-Bike Miami in South Beach. He said he’s hoping to sell scooters since he can’t rent them out.
A low-end scooter can cost about $300, and renting a scooter for about a week would be more expensive, since rentals start at $70 daily.
“It wouldn’t make sense just to rent something when you can just buy a scooter, a bike, and then resell it and you can even make a profit on it,” Prades said. Tourists would need to find a buyer before they go home, however.
Prades and other business managers in the area are generally not thrilled with the restrictions but are trying to work with the city.
“It’s also the business owners’ responsibilities to not overserve,” said Kyle Grossman, a supervisor at Fat Tuesday, a frozen cocktail bar in South Beach. “Greed breeds some of those disastrous situations.”
Grossman feels like some of the city’s measures are just too much, like barricades to block street parking, because, he added, even families could feel unwelcome.
“They’re going, ‘What am I getting myself into?’ Too many restrictions make good people also weary,” he added.
Still, the city is going full stop on the rules. It put out a video on social media to let visitors know that police will be enforcing them, like stopping people from drinking in public or using a speaker on the beach.
Jelani Massey, visiting Miami Beach on spring break from college in Washington, D.C., doesn’t mind the rules. He was expecting to find the unruliness of past years.
“People to be dancing on top of cars and the streets to be full,” he said. Instead, South Beach was pretty quiet when he arrived — and he’s happy with that.
“This is my first time being here for spring break, but it seems really safe, really fun,” Massey said. “A lot of people just having a good time.”
The strict rules don’t seem to have turned visitors off. Hotel occupancy rates went up last year even with restrictions, according to the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. So far, March this year looks about the same.
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