South Beach is a neighborhood of Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County, Florida. The area was settled in 1870 for coconut farming, but - in 1912 - the Lummus Brothers acquired 400 acres of farmland to build an oceanfront city. By the 1920s, Miami Beach was home to several newly-built beachfront hotels, and Miami Beach became a tourism hotspot after World War II. From the mid-1960s to the 1980s, South Beach was home to a large retirement community, but the cocaine boom of the 1980s led to "cocaine cowboys" using South Beach as a base for their drug dealing operations. Tony Montana's Montana Cartel seized South Beach from Gaspar Gomez's Gomez Cartel in a vicious gang war in 1984, and South Beach became known as a melting pot of criminals, Cuban refugees, and elderly people. The late 1980s saw South Beach experience a renaissance during which fashion industry professionals gentrified the neighborhood, and it became one of the most prosperous commercial areas on the beach. By the 21st century, South Beach was full of upscale condominiums and high-rise, high-density buildings, and the crime rates dropped as a result. In 2010, South Beach had a population of 39,186 people.