Lately, you can’t frequent downtown Boca Raton without seeing the top of a crane or scaffolding where workers in brightly colored clothing are busy with construction.
For the past few years, new residential units, hotel rooms, retail and office space have popped up in Boca Raton’s downtown scape.
These new developments are part of a vision to redevelop the downtown, but with the surge of people flocking to the area, diminishing vacant land and developmental design restrictions, city officials are finding ways to forge ahead on their plans of redesign.
What’s coming?
At least five Boca Raton Community Redevelopment Agency-approved projects in and around the downtown area are currently under construction. Some of the most prominent include:
- Phase Two of the Alina Residences, a nine-story building at 200 SE Mizner Blvd. Once this phase is complete, nearly 400 luxury condominium units will be in Boca’s downtown.
- Phases Two and Three of Via Mizner, a triad of buildings at South Federal Highway and East Camino Real featuring 85 condominium units at Mandarin Oriental and The Mandarin Oriental Hotel, squeezed between the condos and apartments. 101 Via Mizner, which has 366 apartments, has been up for the past several years.
- Royal Palm Residences, which are three nine-story towers featuring 48 luxury condominiums ranging in size from 2,450 square feet to 3,700 square feet at 475 E. Royal Palm Road.
- Camino Square will provide even more residential units with 350 apartment units packed into eight stories at 171 W. Camino Square.
Marc Wigder, the Boca Raton Community Redevelopment Agency chair, said the CRA currently has 14 approved projects that are not yet completed, eight of which are still in need of the proper permits before construction can begin.
“There are buildings in every stage of the process,” he said.
In some respects, development projects are still dealing with the effects from COVID-19, Wigder said, because the pandemic spurred delays in approvals and construction.
“Just because COVID happened doesn’t mean that the need for housing diminished, there’s still people moving,” he said. “Now, demand is even more.”
Despite the rather rigid design guidelines Boca architects and developers face when creating projects, downtown Boca Raton is still one of South Florida’s fastest-growing destinations.
Scott Gerow, the executive director of luxury sales at the Cotilla-Beresh-Gerow Luxury Team at Compass, said Boca Raton has some of the most restrictive guidelines for buildings, but for good reason.
“The residents of Boca Raton, and I think the local government, don’t want Boca Raton to become a Fort Lauderdale,” he said. “In other words, skyscrapers, really high buildings. They’re very much against that.”
When Aletto Square, a project featuring a 10-story office space with rooftop dining, another six-story office building and a six-story parking garage with roughly 550 spaces at Palmetto Park Road and Northeast First Avenue, was moving through the city approvals process, many residents came forward and expressed vehement opposition to the project. They cited concerns about the development altering the charm that distinguishes Boca from other cities in South Florida that feature high rises.
Gerow, who represented a developer for Phase One of Alina Residences, said they had to follow specific architectural codes to gain approvals from the city.
“Those were very, very much based on Addison Mizner’s vision of the city,” he said. “There is a lot of more modern and contemporary architecture that you see across South Florida. But I know that you have to still harken back to the roots of the city when it was first developed.”
This specific criteria coupled with conversations among the CRA about curating a more walkable, pedestrian-friendly downtown contribute to what Wigder said is the ultimate goal of becoming a “vision zero” city, meaning the elimination of all traffic-related fatalities and injuries and an atmosphere of equitable mobility.
“This all connects,” Wigder said. “It’s in the budget, and it’s in the planning stages.”
What’s already there?
Some more recently completed projects in the downtown area include Tower 155, an eight-, 10- and 12-story building with 128 units at 155 E. Boca Raton Road and the Boca Raton Brightline Station, which sits north of Palmetto Park Road between Mizner Park and the city’s public library.
Wigder and the rest of the CRA see the establishment of the new station as a glimpse into a future of heightened connectivity for all of Boca Raton, not just the downtown area.
“If we can get this West-East connection now that you have the Brightline, it’ll be tremendous,” he said.
Like Wigder, Andrea Levine O’Rourke, the former city of Boca Raton deputy mayor, believes the new station and corresponding Brightline accessibility is a great addition to the downtown. But it still has potential, she said.
“How do we make it advantageous for our community to bring people into our community as opposed to getting people to the train station and leaving to go somewhere else?” O’Rourke, now a community advocate, said. “It’s a great asset, but we haven’t figured out the infrastructure that goes around that.”
A shuttle service that would take people to and from the Brightline is coming with the construction of Aletto Square.
“I could see kind of everybody wanting to piggyback on this,” Wigder said. “Once you get the shuttle system up and running, I think many building owners downtown are going to want to participate, which is obviously the intent, you want them (residents) to leave their cars at home.”
Looking ahead
Also like Wigder, O’Rourke believes the downtown and its structures should be built to also help people, so factors like walkability are considered.
Buildings should do more than just serve as residential, office, hotel or retail units — they should contribute to the public space, O’Rourke said. Bringing an architect onto city staff or creating a task force of architects would help, she said, because then factors such as transportation, design and placemaking, which addresses ways to strengthen the community through buildings, would be considered when making development proposals.
Another factor to consider in the future of Boca’s downtown development is the availability of vacant land — or, in this case, the lack thereof. “The only development that will happen going down the road in the future will be redevelopment because they’ve used up the space,” O’Rourke said. “That’s a big conversation that has to happen with City Council as to what they plan to do for the future development in downtown.”
With Boca Raton’s 100th birthday coming up in 2025, growth does not appear to be stopping any time soon.
“We’ve done a lot of work downtown, not just reviewing projects which come before us, but also in terms of improving the infrastructure,” Wigder said. “It’s exciting, to really be that focused in addition to all the other great things that are happening in the city.”
