Russians have flocked to Donald Trump’s Florida

A ROUND a century ago, a furniture magnate from Rochester, New York named Harvey Baker Graves spent a day boating through the estuarine wilds of upper Biscayne Bay, along the southern Atlantic coast of Florida. What today is beach-front property was then a verdant, claustral jungle; in photographs the dinosaurs seem to be lurking just outside the frame. Graves was so enamoured of this landscape and its potential that he bought a large swathe of mangrove forest and tortuous waterways dotted with uninhabitable little islands.

That swamp is now Sunny Isles Beach, a town on a barrier island, just across the Intracoastal Waterway from North Miami Beach. For much of the 20th century it was a modest redoubt far from Miami’s glamour and hustle, with larger hotels on the ocean and longer, lower ones on the inland blocks. Rundown by the 1980s, developers began snapping up properties. In 2001 the city’s first new hotel in more than 30 years opened. Today hotels and condominiums line Sunny Isles’ two-mile beach-front, including three Trump-branded high-rises. And while the previous incarnation of Sunny Isles attracted American snowbirds and the odd ageing celebrity, in its current form it is a magnet for Russians.

They began arriving—according to Larisa Svechin, the town’s vice-mayor, who was born in Gomel, Belarus—in the late...