Star Island / Palm Island / Hibiscus Island — Dredged in the 1920s, Guarded Today, and Genuinely Tiny

What These Three Islands Actually Are

Star Island, Palm Island, and Hibiscus Island are not a suburb of Miami Beach and not a natural extension of the barrier island next door -- they are three separate, artificially created islands sitting in Biscayne Bay along the MacArthur Causeway, the roadway connecting downtown Miami to South Beach. The causeway itself (originally the County Causeway) began construction in 1917 and opened to the public on February 17, 1920, renamed for General Douglas MacArthur in 1942; it remains the sole roadway link for cars moving between the mainland, these three islands, and Miami Beach proper. Star Island was developed by Carl Fisher -- the same figure credited as a founding force behind Miami Beach itself -- with dredging and fill work completed in 1922; the island was originally platted with large lots along a single, clockwise loop road (Star Island Drive), and its first home was designed by Miami architect Walter De Garmo and built in 1924. Palm Island and Hibiscus Island were created on a nearly identical timeline by the Biscayne Bay Islands Company, with the underlying land creation substantially finished by November 1919, contemporaneous with the causeway's own construction, and development beginning in 1920 under builders Locke T. Highleyman and Clarence Busch. All three islands reach the causeway through private, gated spur roads rather than ordinary public streets, which is the single biggest structural fact that separates this market from almost anything else on this site.

The scale here is genuinely small in a way that matters for anyone evaluating it as a real estate market. Star Island is commonly cited at roughly 34 home sites on about 86.5 acres. Palm Island is cited at roughly 136 homes on about 82 acres. Hibiscus Island is cited at roughly 145 homes -- about 91 of them waterfront -- on about 69 acres. Added together, that puts the combined market at somewhere near 300 to 320 total home sites across all three islands, a number this page treats as an approximate aggregate drawn from multiple independent real estate research sources rather than a single official parcel count pulled from the Miami-Dade Property Appraiser. That's not a large subdivision measured against a typical coastal market on this site -- it's closer in scale to a single well-developed cul-de-sac neighborhood, and the practical consequences of that scarcity (thin comparable sales, long time-on-market, off-market deal flow) show up repeatedly across this page family.

Access is genuinely different from every ocean-facing market this site covers, and different again from the ferry-only islands elsewhere on the site. These are drive-on islands connected to the mainland by an ordinary public road -- no ferry schedule, no golf-cart-only rule, no barge for furniture. But that public road ends at a private gate. Star Island's single entrance off the MacArthur Causeway has a documented, staffed guardhouse, and non-residents cannot drive onto the island without being pre-approved by a resident; pedestrian and bicycle access are similarly restricted without authorization. Palm Island and Hibiscus Island share their own private access bridge off the same causeway and are likewise widely described by multiple real estate sources as gated, private communities, though this page found the clearest primary documentation of a staffed guardhouse specifically for Star Island and treats the exact current gate procedure for Palm and Hibiscus as something to confirm directly with a resident or the islands' homeowners association before assuming it matches Star Island's setup exactly. A joint voluntary community group, the Palm, Hibiscus and Star Islands (PHS) Home Association, describes its own mission as keeping the islands 'safe, fun and beautiful' and notes the islands' history predates today's quiet residential character -- from the 1940s into the 1950s, the Palm/Hibiscus area was home to the Latin Quarter Nightclub, where performers including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett are described as having appeared, per local historical accounts.

The celebrity and historic-ownership reputation of these islands is real, but this page draws a firm line between what's independently documented and what's merely repeated. Al Capone bought a Palm Island mansion at 93 Palm Avenue in 1928 -- the deal closed March 27, 1928, structured through a straw buyer, Parker Henderson Jr., for $40,000 -- and lived there until his death in January 1947; his widow Mae and son Sonny remained until Mae sold the property in February 1952 for $54,000. That house was demolished in August 2023 despite preservation efforts, a real and recent loss of one of the island's most historically documented structures. On Star Island, Gloria and Emilio Estefan bought a roughly 12,000-square-foot, two-acre estate in December 1986 for $600,000; in September 2021 they sold that property -- known as Nena's Villa, at 1 Star Island Drive -- for $35 million to Sean 'Diddy' Combs, who in turn sold it in July 2026 for $55 million, according to trade-press reporting. Beyond these documented, dated transactions, real estate blogs and tour-guide sites repeat a longer list of names associated with the islands over the decades; this page did not independently verify those additional claims against primary reporting in this research pass and does not restate them as confirmed fact.

Property values here sit at a scale most buyer guides on this site never have to address. A February 2026 market snapshot for the combined Star/Palm/Hibiscus Islands neighborhood put the median sale price at $24 million and the average sale price at roughly $14.7 million -- an unusual pairing, since a median above the average is atypical in a right-skewed luxury market and most likely reflects how few transactions this data set is built on. The trailing-12-month median sale price was reported at roughly $9.4 million, down about 20% year-over-year, with listed prices ranging from $5.695 million to $99 million and homes sitting a reported median of 233 days on market against a 54-day national average. None of these figures should be read as precise appraisals -- a market moving perhaps a dozen or two homes a year produces genuinely volatile statistics, and this page flags that volatility explicitly rather than presenting any single number as settled fact.