Joel EngelhardtRelated Urban plans 149-unit apartment building at Marina Village on Broadway.
Once, the community fought over preservation of the Spanish Courts motel at Broadway and 12th Street in Riviera Beach.
On Monday, the community cheered the groundbreaking of an $80 million, 149-unit apartment building on the site, which has been vacant since the historic stucco cottages, dating to 1939 with red-tile roofs and wrought-iron gates, were demolished in 2016.
The groundbreaking for the Residences at Marina Village marks the start of work that could bring more than 1,100 new housing units to a four-block area straddling Broadway on the city’s south end.
It brought celebratory remarks from city and county leaders, who gathered first in the Marina Event Center before moving outside to the site for a ceremonial shovel toss.
Riviera Beach Mayor Douglas Lawson thanked the project’s developer, Related Urban Development Group, for “drowning out the noise of people saying what Riviera Beach cannot do.”
“This,” he said, “is showing what Riviera Beach can do.”
City Manager Jonathan Evans made a similar point.
“As we continue to move these projects forward, whatever you heard about the city of Riviera Beach, if it’s positive, it’s true,” Evans said. “If it’s negative, I would tell you just need to see what’s beneath the surface, and you need to come and see for yourself that we have a lot of great people that live here, that work here, that play here and want to see Riviera Beach thrive.”
Rents as low as $513 a month
Armed with a $38.6 million tax-credit loan from M&T Bank of Buffalo, N.Y., Related Urban, a division of Miami’s Related Group, thanked Palm Beach County for its $4.7 million contribution through the State Housing Initiatives Partnership, and Riviera Beach, which owns the land and provided $1.5 million.
The project is among the first in the state to get a $15.4 million State Apartment Incentive Loan, or SAIL, through the Florida Housing Finance Corp.
Eight of the heavily subsidized one- and two-bedroom apartments will be rented for as little as $513 a month to some of the lowest-income residents allowed under affordable housing guidelines at 30% of AMI or area median income.
More than half the units, 87, will have two bedrooms and two baths. All but 37 units will go to people who earn less than 80% of AMI.
Those limits put the project on the level of reaching the lowest-income renters as two other recent projects: Berkeley Landing, a 112-unit apartment building that opened on Broadway last year, and Flagler Station, a 94-unit project in downtown West Palm Beach.
The Residences will offer a 270-space parking garage, fitness center and pool.
Riviera Beach boom time
It will be the first new construction in years in the city’s rebuilt Marina Village, which is still seeking a developer to build a hotel, stores and restaurants along the Intracoastal Waterway.
At eight stories, the Residences at Marina Village will be dwarfed by Related Group’s next offering: twin 20-story towers on the neighboring parcel with 418 market-rate apartments.
Related Group is partnering with BH Group and Tezral Partners on the $250 million project, called the Gallery at Marina Village.
And the influx of new residents will continue across the street, where the City Council will consider plans Wednesday night, Oct. 1, for a four-tower, 508-unit condo project by developer Jeffrey Sobel.
One block west is Villa L’Onz, which promises 24 townhomes and 30 condos.
Long forgotten Spanish Courts
For years, the site of the Residences at Marina Village was dominated by Spanish Courts, a quaint mom-and-pop motel that thrived until the 1980s when it fell into disrepair during the crack epidemic, as The Palm Beach Post reported.
Efforts to restore the cottages consumed Riviera Beach revival talks in the 1990s and early 2000s and drew about $1.5 million in public money before falling short.
The renovated cottages fell into disrepair and the bulldozers came in April 2016, clearing the site of everything except a few trees, including at least one kapok tree that the developer has committed to preserving.
