SoFla rental market booms
Apartment construction is still thriving across South Florida, with hundreds of new units now rising in northern Broward.
Deerfield Beach recently gave the green light to building more than 300 apartments — while Coconut Creek and Pompano Beach have projects underway that range from 111 to 296 units.
It’s a trend that’s happening across the region as homeownership rates have yet to rebound from the real estate meltdown that left many people owing more on their houses than they were worth.
A bumper crop of new apartments could help relieve the scarcity of available residences, which has made housing in South Florida one of the most unaffordable in the country when compared to local income, said Florida Atlantic University Professor Eric Dumbaugh, who specializes in planning and design.
“It’s worse than San Francisco and New York,”
Dumbaugh said.
A number of factors are at play in this boom in midlevel housing, said Jesse Saginor, an FAU professor who specializes in real estate market trends at the School of Urban and Regional Planning.
Some of the more expensive luxury homes are taking longer to sell, so “there is more demand for the middle market,” he said.
For communities with no opportunity to grow through annexation — such as Coconut Creek, Deerfield Beach and Pompano Beach — “the only way they can develop is vertically, which is why you see a lot more multi-family housing,” he said.
In Deerfield Beach, up to 326 apartments are expected to go on 8.4 acres in a neighborhood now populated by vacant lots, singlefamily homes, storage facilities and a marina near the Dixie Highway flyover. The county still must OK the changes approved by the city last month.
The new waterfront community would go along the Hillsboro Canal, a stone’s throw from Deerfield’s planned downtown area and 2 miles from the beach.
Pennell’s Marine also will be coming down and moving to where Freedom Marine Center is now, according to local officials.
“It’s exciting to have this project come in,” said Mayor Bill Ganz, referring to zoning changes approved March 20 with a 4-1 vote.
Meanwhile, Pompano Beach is seeing its first, large-scale residential development in decades to go west of Dixie Highway. The finishing touches are still in progress but it’s already 100 percent leased.
Residents last week started moving into City Vista’s 111 new apartments, which are north of Atlantic Boulevard and east of Interstate 95. “I think it’s beautiful,” said Jordan Pace, who manages the Innovation District in Pompano’s Northwest Community Redevelopment Agency.
Height restrictions in the area were raised to 105 feet in 2013, anticipating that such a change would encourage large-scale apartment projects and bring in new customers and businesses to an area that has dealt with blight.
Coconut Creek’s Monarch Station, which opened to residents in November, still has one last building to finish for its 296-unit project on Sample Road, between Banks and Lyons roads.
The four-story apartment buildings are a key part of an entertainment district that Coconut Creek envisions growing up adjacent to its center of restaurants and shops, Promenade at Coconut Creek.
Jack McCabe, a longtime housing industry analyst based in Deerfield Beach, said that the three projects are just a couple of a slew of new apartment projects that will be coming out of the ground.
Market feasibility studies that he conducts for developers were almost all condos before 2012 and now that’s completely switched to apartment project studies.
“Apartment development I would say is the du jour of investors,” he said. “A lot of these projects are leased out before construction is finished.”
He sees the renting trend becoming more pronounced in South Florida, especially for snowbirds who don’t want to tie their money up in real estate.
In Deerfield Beach, Otto Fowler has long lived in the Dixie Highway flyover neighborhood that could soon have the new apartments.
He likes how his neighborhood has grown more diverse through the years. “When I moved here, it was 100 percent black,” he said. “Now it’s becoming more like a melting pot.”
He said he expects the new development to help spruce up the community. “I hope they put up a wall and some nice landscaping” around it, he said.