Over the past quarter-century, the Miami skyline has grown at a cornfield pace, fueled largely, realtors say, by buyers from South America. This trend is more natural here than in cities like Vancouver, where mainland Chinese are big condo buyers, or Paris, where Americans, among others, trade chic pied-à-terres. After all, most Miami residents speak Spanish at home, and the metro area has the highest share of immigrant business ownership in the country, at 45 percent. This is why the city is sometimes called the “Capital of Latin America.”

Whether or not Miami deserves that moniker, it certainly attracts another kind of capital from Latin America.

A study released last month by the Miami Downtown Development Authority found that 90 percent of demand for new condos in Brickell, Downtown and Edgewater — a 4.5 mile swath of waterfront neighborhoods across the bay from Miami Beach — is from foreign buyers. More than six in 10 pre-sale buyers come from Latin America.

Most remarkably, for a major American downtown: Only one in 10 new apartments is purchased as a primary residence.

It’s hard to think of an appropriate parallel to another world city, let alone one in the United States. The area in question is not small: Imagine Manhattan’s West Side from 110th Street to 23rd Street, with 4,500 units under construction. (For comparison’s sake, Manhattan in toto, with a population four times that of Miami, authorized barely 5,000 new units in 2013.)

Miami has succeeded, in other words, in doing what Rust Belt towns like Detroit and Toledo are dreaming of: regenerating downtown through foreign investment.

Only a quarter of Miami condo buyers take out mortgages, versus 70 percent nationwide.

But Miami condos aren’t priced like their equivalents in New York City and London. The average price of a unit in a current selling project is $662,439. It’s not pocket change; but it’s also less than half the average condo price in Manhattan. Median sale prices in San Francisco recently topped $1 million.

Though funded by transfers from foreign bank accounts and seldom assumed as a primary residence, Miami’s new apartments aren’t anything to gawk at. The average Miami condo is closer in value to a healthy retirement savings account than a drug-money fortune.

This may be related to another difference between the market in Miami and its global-city big sisters. According to a recent New York magazine article, “30 percent of all apartments in the quadrant from 49th to 70th Streets between Fifth and Park are vacant at least ten months a year.” London, too, suffers from ghost districts dominated by part-time (or no-time) owners.

But the crop of downtown Miami condos from the last cycle, according to the Downtown Development Authority, are over 95-percent occupied, whether by part-time owners or, more likely, by tenants. Miami neighborhoods may lack the organic texture of 57th Street or Mayfair, but their buildings are not lacking for people.