A Grand Theft Auto VI fan has traced the fictional Vice City apartment shared by protagonists Jason and Lucia to a real address in Miami's Edgewater neighborhood — a 13-unit condo building that was bought out and demolished years before the game's trailer ever surfaced. Using Google Maps' historical imagery feature, the fan located the building in the exact position and orientation depicted in the trailer, matching the skyline visible through the apartment window to modern-day Miami. Today, the address holds nothing but an empty, weed-choked lot.
The building was the Belmar Condominium at 419 Northeast 19th Street, constructed in 1973 and torn down during GTA VI's development, according to Dexerto. Archived Zillow listings reportedly confirmed that Rockstar Games recreated not just the building's exterior but its actual interior floor plan for Jason and Lucia's in-game home. Rockstar had sent a dedicated location-research team to South Florida for multi-year field studies of local architecture and neighborhoods before designing Vice City, part of an effort Hoodline detailed in its report on the studio's outreach to Miami-Dade's pitch for GTA VI cash.
A Modest Condo Sold for $12 Million
The Belmar's 13 units sat on a compact triangular lot spanning just 0.3 acres, or 14,190 square feet, where North Bayshore Drive and Northeast 4th Avenue converge. A developer's attorney later described the parcel to Miami officials as shaped like the blade of an X-Acto knife, according to The Real Deal. The site sat directly across the street from Margaret Pace Park, an 8-acre bayfront green space that gave the Belmar its views of Biscayne Bay — the same water views that ended up framed in Jason and Lucia's apartment window.
SB Development and Hazelton Capital Group purchased all 13 units in the building for $12 million in August 2022, working out to roughly $923,076 per unit. The plan was to clear the site for Vela, a proposed $300 million, 55-story tower designed by New York-based architecture firm Fogarty Finger, which took on the challenge of fitting 553,673 square feet of building space onto the sliver-shaped lot.
Zoning Pushback Sank the Tower
The Vela project never got off the ground. In October 2023, Miami's Urban Development Review Board strongly opposed the plans, deeming the 0.3-acre lot far too small for a proposed 463-unit high-rise, and developers ultimately withdrew their application. The board's rejection followed controversy over how developers had tried to make the tower pencil out in the first place: to support the density needed for a 55-story building, they had purchased 300 unused density units from the board of the adjacent Cité on the Bay condominium for $14,000 per unit in 2022, a move that sparked outrage from Cité owners who said they were never consulted, per The Real Deal's later reporting.
The Belmar came down anyway, and the lot has remained empty since, reportedly listed as on hold as of this year. It's part of a broader pattern across South Florida, where developers have targeted aging waterfront condo buildings in neighborhoods like Edgewater for bulk buyouts and luxury tower replacements, a trend Hoodline examined in its coverage of a similar Biscayne 21 condo dispute. Post-Surfside safety mandates and increased regulatory oversight have only added to the pressure on older condo boards to sell.
A Building That Lives On Only in Pixels
The discovery is the latest find from a sprawling online effort to reverse-engineer the real-world geography behind GTA VI's fictional state of Leonida, which includes Vice City, Rockstar's stand-in for Miami, situated within the fictional Vice-Dale County, according to IGN. The GTA VI Mapping Project community has spent years cross-referencing trailer snippets and leaks against real-world GIS data, old Zillow floor plans, and satellite imagery to pin down exactly which South Florida landmarks inspired the game's world, according to GTA Base.
The Belmar's disappearance from the physical map, followed by its digital resurrection in a video game, has become something of a case study in how thoroughly Rockstar's research team documented Miami before the wrecking ball arrived. The building no longer exists on North Bayshore Drive, but thanks to one fan's sleuthing through old satellite imagery, its floor plan and its bay views are preserved, at least virtually, inside Vice City.
