THE ENTREPRENEUR
MILES ALEXANDER III, 39
Founder, Principal and Managing Partner
Alexander Goshen, Fort Lauderdale
The Backstory
When Miles Alexander III talks about community, he’s describing a philosophy that has shaped his career in real estate development.
“I moved around a lot,” Alexander says, recalling a childhood spent in homes across Philadelphia and New Jersey’s foster care systems. After high school in 2005, he joined the U.S. Army, stationed in Fort Lewis, Wash., moving up the ranks from infantryman to ranger. “I was just trying to do my best. I had a plan to be a career soldier,” he says. But during a tour in Iraq, he was 100% medically discharged.
Alexander returned to civilian life with a new mission: to chart his next life. He focused on getting an education in real estate, a career field that had interested him since he was a teen. He thought he’d be a real estate agent but quickly realized that wasn’t for him. Instead, he used his savings and started buying, rehabbing and flipping small single-family homes — tax liens, foreclosures, properties others had written off.
From there, Alexander moved into single-family construction in subdivisions and got his own general contractor’s license to control quality and costs. At a real estate conference, Alexander met a developer renovating an apartment complex. He offered to estimate a construction bid and saved the man a significant sum. That relationship grew into a partnership and ultimately opened the door to large-scale projects — and some key learnings about how deals were structured. Alexander quickly realized he was doing the work while someone else was building the equity, he says. “I started buying apartment complexes myself. That led me to doing ground-up development on large-scale projects myself, which I am doing today.”
Finding a Niche
Alexander’s first ground-up development was a 176-unit workforce housing project in Hampton, Ga., completed in 2017. “It was my first deal, and it took forever, but I quickly learned that this is the route I wanted to take,” he says. “I started partnering with the right people, people with far more experience in leveraging relationships, to start doing more deals.”
Today, Alexander is the founder and managing partner of Alexander Goshen, a real estate development firm that specializes in workforce and affordable housing. His 12-year-old company has delivered more than 2,600 housing units nationwide, with another 1,500 in the pipeline. The self-taught builder is a believer in what he calls impact development — real estate that prioritizes the long-term community benefit, not only profit.
Affordable housing isn’t easy — it’s political, it’s competitive and it’s slow — but that’s where the real need is, he says. Today, about 75% of his company’s business is workforce and affordable housing.
One of the ongoing projects Alexander is most excited about is the Tomlinson Workforce Housing Project in St. Petersburg, a public-private collaboration with the local school district designed to create attainable housing for teachers and district staff. The adaptive reuse project will transform an old school site into a 14-story, 264-unit development, a model Alexander hopes will be replicated statewide. “It represents exactly the kind of collaborative, community-centered development that drives our work.”
He explains: “We’re focused on delivering well-designed, attainable housing in neighborhoods where affordability and accessibility are becoming increasingly challenging. Projects like Tomlinson, along with our other ongoing work in Tampa Bay and South Florida, highlight our commitment to high-impact, community-responsible development.” Other public-private partnerships are in the pipeline, Alexander says.
Other Housing Concepts
Another growing area of focus is so-called pocket communities that prioritize walkability, green space and shared areas — elements often forgotten in today’s developments. For instance, a pocket neighborhood could be a dozen small homes surrounding a shared garden courtyard, pedestrian street or community green that encourages residents to know their neighbors.
Alexander Goshen is testing and advancing several pocket communities and other clustered housing concepts in Central Florida. In addition to shared greenspace, Alexander says, these neighborhoods could include access to lifestyle programming, local food vendors and educational offerings. The goal: shaping healthier, more resilient communities and creating places “where people can be human.”
For Alexander, it’s personal. “When I was growing up, I was part of the neighborhood, and the (people in the) neighborhood raised each other. Kids went outside to play,” he says. “Today, people walk straight from their front door to their car without even waving to their neighbor.”
ABOUT THE BUSINESS
The Name Game:
The company’s name, Alexander Goshen, stems from the biblical “Land of Goshen,” a place of prosperity and refuge.
Teammates: Alexander built a 10-person team of seasoned professionals. His COO previously served as Tampa’s director of housing. His senior analyst came from investment banking. His development partner is a 30-year veteran of the industry who’s worked on projects including Trump Tower.
Five-year Goal: Growing the company’s portfolio to 20,000 units under management, with a focus on master-planned, mixed-income communities that redefine what affordable living looks like. “The challenges around affordability are significant,” Alexander says, “but so are the opportunities to rethink how we build and who we build for.”