Moishe Mana

Mana was born in Israel, outside Tel Aviv, to impoverished Sephardic Jews from Iraq. His father at first earned his living with a horse-drawn vegetable and fruit cart outside Tel Aviv. Moishe would accompany him on his rounds. After dropping out of college and arriving in New York he started out washing dishes, then got a van and was hired as a mover, working day and night. The business grew into Moishe’s Moving, the biggest and most familiar moving company in New York. Mana eventually branched out into the more lucrative storage and warehousing business. He bought warehouses cheaply, upgraded them and amassed holdings across the country, Latin America and China. In the 1990s, Mana was among the earliest investors in a then-raw Meatpacking District in Manhattan. Mana has been in an eight-year $500 million buying spree, with the first of his 70 downtown Miami properties to go into construction in 2022 as the grandly named Nikola Tesla Innovation Hub. Mana has a vision for a renascent Flagler Street district humming with technology firms, fashion showrooms, dining and entertainment. Once renovations are done, the Tesla building, an office mid-rise now reduced to a skeleton without walls, will be home to cutting-edge firms. On the corner in front, on Southeast First Street, a waterfall will grace an outdoor restaurant. Mana Common, a novel sort of capitalistic enterprise in which tenants — or, rather, “members” — will share ownership and profits from the collective venture instead of paying full rent, so they won’t be pushed out when property values rise.