Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Boca to boom again?
‘Live-work-play’ district is planned
Mizner Park was the cornerstone in the 1990s, with a recent building boom making downtown Boca Raton a “live-work-play” destination. Now, the developer that created Mizner Park hopes to bring the same dynamic in the next decade to the Town Center mall area, called “Midtown Boca.”
As a building boom transforms downtown Boca Raton with more than 1,400 apartments, developers have unveiled a plan to bring just as many residences to the city’s west end, near the Town Center mall.
Anywhere from 1,300 to 2,500 apartments and condos would be built over the next decade to create “Midtown Boca.”
The nearly 270-acre district would feature specialty grocery stores, boutique shops and possibly a movie theater, according to Angelo Bianco, managing partner for Crocker Partners, one of the four developers involved in the plan.
The area is roughly framed by the Town Center mall to the west, Glades Road to the north, Interstate 95 to the east and Verde Trail to the south. The developers want to make Midtown a “live-work-play” district, where going shopping or to work is just a short walk from home.
Crocker Partners has created such destinations before. It is the same developer who in
1991 built Mizner Park, the complex in downtown Boca that offers a mix of retail and restaurants next to apartments.
Bianco said that compared with Mizner Park, Midtown would be more pedestrian-friendly. He mentioned Mizner Park’s wide median, which has walking paths and benches. He said it may look nice, but pedestrians seem to like smaller areas, such as the sidewalk seating in front of restaurants.
“There are changes we can make from lessons learned from Mizner Park,” Bianco said. “We’ve now come back to fix what we’ve seen 30 years has taught us in this particular area.”
Today, the Midtown land is mostly a mix of shops, restaurants and commercial buildings. There are no residential buildings, and the area has only a few stretches of narrow sidewalks.
Crocker already owns just more than a fifth of Midtown, buying up about 60 of the nearly 270 acres in 2014. Among those parcels was Boca Center, a high-end shopping and dining hub that the company also built.
The proposal is the latest in a string of plans by developers to build in the city, while some residents worry about traffic jams amid a rising population.
“I think the developer has done a good job of giving an outlook that this will be a wonderful place, but they’ve completely taken focus off what it’s going to be like with all of these residents,” said Bill DeAngelis, who lives in the Paradise Palms neighborhood south of Midtown. “It’s all about overpopulation for me.”
To try to allay traffic concerns, the Midtown developers recently invited neighbors to town-hall sessions. They also created midtownboca.com, a website that promotes the project.
Developers say a mix of residential and retail space would cut down on the city’s traffic congestion, on top of giving residents ways to get around without driving.
Ideally, Midtown would have a privately funded shuttle, on-demand golf carts and designated areas for ride-hailing services such as Lyft and Uber, according to Bianco. Building a new Tri-Rail station also is being considered.
“It would be a system that will allow people to be less reliant on vehicles,” Bianco said. “We’re trying to build for the future.”
The city’s Planning and Zoning board still needs to OK the number of apartments allowed. The panel saw the proposal last month but postponed a vote to send it to the City Council. It plans to further review the plan.
Michael Marshall, a lawyer with GrayRobinson representing Midtown developers, said, “We don’t have the rules yet, but we’re trying to get the rules in place.”
Mayor Susan Haynie called Midtown “a very exciting project,” but said she does see some issues.
“I think the unit count [the number of apartments] is a little aggressive,” she said.
Crocker backed a traffic study that said the area could support 1,300 residences without creating traffic jams. A new Tri-Rail station, if built, may help the area accommodate up to 2,500 living units because residents would have one more significant way to travel, developers say.
The traffic study will be vetted. Haynie said she’d like to see more details on how the project would alleviate traffic. As chairwoman of the Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization, she said there could be funding for the additional Tri-Rail station just north of Boca Center.
Bonnie Arnold, spokeswoman for Tri-Rail, added, “It’s definitely feasible.”
Another point of friction for residents is the types of businesses that would be allowed in the area. Midtown was annexed into the city in 2003 and still falls under county zoning, which sometimes gives businesses rules that are more lenient than Boca’s.
“Vie Verde loves that idea of the Midtown development,” said Adam Beighley, a lawyer representing the Via Verde neighborhood association, which borders Midtown to the south. “But it’s important that we make sure that the uses and the businesses that go in there are conducive with the environment.”
Some of the businesses in the Midtown area likely will be temporarily relocated while buildings are rebranded or rebuilt.
It isn’t much of a problem for Gary Santoro, a Boca native who owns Vertu Fine Art in Midtown’s Boca Center. He moved his gallery from Fort Lauderdale to Boca Raton in 2011 and said he liked the central location between East and West Boca.
He said he has heard some talk about the project and welcomes any improvements to make the area more pedestrianfriendly.
“Anything to bring business into the area would be great,” Santoro said. “I think people love to go to places where you can walk around.”