South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Steelers’ Pouncey buys new $5.4M home in Las Olas Isles
Features 6 bedrooms, 7 full and 2 half baths, game room and smart-home technology
NFL player Maurkice Pouncey, who played for the Florida Gators and was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first round of the 2010 NFL Draft, has purchased a newly constructed contemporary mansion in the Las Olas Isles neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale for $5.4 million.
The 7,000-square-foot, three-story home, at 633 Coral Way, has six bedrooms, seven full and two half baths, a master suite, smart-home technology and an elevator. The third floor features a game room, an additional full kitchen and a rooftop terrace. Exterior features include 100 linear feet of water frontage, a pool, spa, concrete dock and summer kitchen.
Las Olas Isles consists of a series of finger islands off Las Olas Boulevard between the city and the beach. “It’s one of the most prestigious waterfront communities in east Fort Lauderdale,” said Peter Barkin, a real estate agent with Compass Florida LLC in Fort Lauderdale, who held the listing along with colleague Mark Gilman. “It’s the Venice of America and one of the most beautiful stretch of streets in Fort Lauderdale.” The neighborhood is within walking distance of Las Olas Boulevard, Barkin said.
The property, which sits on a quarter-acre lot, was completed in 2020. It was listed in February for $5.895 million and sold on May 22. Adam Burke of Grandiose Real Estate represented Pouncey. The seller was S & Z Residential LLC, managed by Zennon L.
Mierzwa.
“The advantages of this particular home are twofold,” Barkin said. “First, it sits one lot from the point, and the views of the New River, Intracoastal Waterway and skyline from the kitchen, dock, bedrooms and rooftop are outstanding. Also, from a boater’s perspective, if you want a day at sea, the inlet to the ocean is just five or 10 minutes away.”
Pouncey, a center, has spent his entire career with the Steelers and played in eight Pro Bowls. He signed a two-year, $22 million contract extension with the Steelers in March 2019.
SEATTLE — A homeless shelter built on Amazon’s perfectly manicured urban Seattle campus is a major civic contribution that pushes the company to face the crisis and criticism in the hometown it has rapidly transformed.
Believed to be the first homeless shelter built inside a corporate office building, Amazon’s partnership housing a local nonprofit could be seen as the company’s answer to criticism that it hasn’t given back enough to the city.
But as Mary’s Place settles into its new space after opening in March, the spotlight turns to the family homeless shelter as a symbol of t he longstanding disparity that advocates insist large corporations help address. For Amazon, it’s a stark display of have and havenots, given that some blame the tech giant’s growth over the past decade for making living in Seattle too costly for a growing number of people.
When Amazon’s offices reopen post-pandemic, the tens of thousands of high-paid tech workers who helped drive up housing costs in the region will now share its pricey downtown neighborhood with vulnerable families who can’t afford any place to live.
Marty Hartman, executive director of Mary’s Place, said the shelter is a life-saving gift for the local community. The location near public transit is ideal, as is its proximity to Amazon workers who regularly volunteer and donate, she said.
“I think it’ll take everyone to help and contribute. Homelessness is a crisis that isn’t going away,” Hartman said.
Amazon estimates the new Mary’s Place building and ongoing utilities and maintenance will amount to a $100 million commitment to the homeless s h e l t e r p ro g ra m. It ’s among the largest homeless shelters in the state and the company’s single largest charitable contribution to its hometown.
The company has promised to host the shelter in the gleaming eightstory facility for as long as it’s needed.
Mary’s Place offers private rooms and is expected to house 1,000 people a year, while the other end is dedicated to Amazon’s cloud computing unit. The shelter shares the “Amazonia” aesthetic t h ro u g h o u t : ex p o s e d pipes, even signs inscribed in the tech giant’s signature office font.
Still, the shelter doesn’t erase the history of resentment over the wealth of Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bez o s, a n d i t s wo r ke r s, which peaked after the company and other corporations successfully pressured the Seattle City Council to rescind a tax on large companies that would have funded homelessness services in 2018.
Months later, Bezos, the wo r l d ’s r i c h e st ma n whose stake in the company he founded is now worth more than $160 billion, announced his longawaited private charitable fund would tackle homelessness — an irony noted by locals and philanthropy scholars alike.
To date, the Bezos Day One Fund has given $196 million in grants to organizations working on family h o me l e s s n e s s issues across the country. He is also creating free preschools, though little else is known about the organization since Bezos first announced the $2 billion private philanthropy fund in 2018. An Amazon representative declined to comment on Bezos’ behalf.
Sara Rankin, a homeless rights advocate and lawyer who leads the Seattlebased Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, said Mary’s Place is a safe investment for Amazon because the nonprofit caters to the most sympathetic kind of homelessness. But Rankin said the shelter ultimately does not address the epicenter of the city’s homelessness crisis.
Amazon’s decision to take in Mary ’s Place, which has multiple locations around the region, Rankin said, means the company is largely ignoring the chronically homeless who are often suffering from mental health or addiction issues, who are the most expensive and c o n t rove r s i a l d e mo - graphic to address.