Boynton Beach's boom: $800 million in new projects
Brian Bandell
Buzzing with the anticipated windfall from $800 million in new construction projects, the coastal town of Boynton Beach is set for an economic awakening.

To accommodate the boom, the quaint Palm Beach County city is starting trolley routes, adding more public spaces and cultural attractions. New hotels are also being planned amidst the construction of thousands of condominium units atop retail space, as developers continue to assemble sites for more mixed-use projects.

Mirroring the redevelopment in downtown West Palm Beach, the county's largest city, Boynton Beach's significantly smaller community redevelopment area (CRA) has captured developers' fancy for transformation.

Its $800 million in new projects, which have been approved or will seek approval in the next nine months, include 3,000 residential units; 200,000 to 300,000 square feet of commercial space; 150,000 square feet of office space and several hotels, CRA Director Douglas Hutchinson said.

All of these projects are in just 30 acres of Boynton Beach's 1,650-acre CRA. The city of about 60,000 residents is investing $40 million in its CRA over five years. Hutchinson calls it the most public/private investment in a CRA per capita in Florida.

While redevelopment is well under way in the trendy downtowns of Boca Raton and Delray Beach to its south, Boynton Beach had remained a working-class city with no central hub or standout attractions. Now the city - most famous for its national champion Little League Baseball team - is swinging for the fences.

"The people of Boynton have waited a long time for something to happen and now all these projects are hitting at once," Hutchinson said. "People will be getting whiplash looking up at all the new buildings."

A major factor in inviting development was the city's increasing the density to 80 units per acre and the height limit to 150 feet, which allowed for ocean views.

The first major project to break ground is Marina Village, a 15-story tower on eight acres along the Intracoastal. The $102 million project, which started construction last April and will be finished early 2006, will have 338 condos, 11 townhouses, 14,000 square feet of retail, a 7,000-square-foot restaurant, 1,800 square feet of offices and a marina with 38 boat slips and a gas pump.

It's the first project in Boynton Beach for Miami-based The Related Group, which will receive $1 million from the CRA to help pay for a parking garage.

The first step they needed was people living in downtown," said Carlos Rosso, Related's project director for Marina Village. "Now the business environment will improve and jobs will be created. When you bring people downtown, that generates demand."
Hutchinson doesn't buy into the trend of New Urbanism. Instead of creating a regional attraction, he said his plan of "old urbanism" focuses on the economics of adding services and public space to support more residents.

"The problem with all these pretty places is that if you don't pay attention to people's basic needs, no one can live there," he said.

There have been far fewer condo flips from Marina Village buyers than with other county projects.

Related's Rosso said investors make up only about 20 percent of buyers in the project, which sold out in one week in summer 2003.

The residential units have been priced from $275 to $300 a square foot, Hutchinson said.

Not only is that cheaper than new units in buildings near Delray Beach's Atlantic Avenue, but projects in Boynton Beach can offer more amenities and ocean views because of the higher densities, said Jeff Krinsky, a partner in Panther Real Estate Partners. The Miami-based company will start sales in February for the 302 condos and 16 townhouses in its $105 million Boynton Beach project, The Promenade.

The residential units will be priced from the $200,000s to $880,000. The project will include retail and the city's first hotel, which will have 77 condo-hotel rooms.

The city will award them a $5.9 million incentive upon completion, which is expected two years after an early summer groundbreaking, Krinsky said.

The CRA has offered to fund half the cost of property owners who assemble large sites to sell to developers. Developers are negotiating to buy and redevelop most of the blocks from Southeast Second Avenue to Northeast Sixth Avenue in between the water and the railroad. That includes the site on the corner of Ocean Avenue and Federal Highway where the CRA has its offices next to a Bank of America office.

Maxwelle Real Estate Group recently bought one more acre for its mixed-use Boynton project, The Arches. The $140 million project will now take up a whole five-acre block, said Ryan Weisfisch, president of the Hallandale Beach-based company. He's revising the original site plan the city approved to expand on plans for 276 condo and townhouse units, mixed with retail and commercial space. Weisfisch plans to break ground by the end of the year.

It's very early in its development - similar to West Palm Beach maybe 10 years ago," he said. "A lot of developers like to follow the curve, but people with vision saw Boynton coming a long way."

In an $18 million undertaking, the city is extending Boynton Beach Boulevard east of Federal Highway, where it will come to a pedestrian promenade along the Intracoastal.

The CRA is also in discussions with National Geographic about building a nearly 35,000-square-foot "Savage Creatures of the Ancient Seas" museum that would be supported on pillars in the Intracoastal and include fossils, a theater and some submerged exhibits.

Ken Kaleel, who's had his law firm in Boynton Beach for 19 years, says he has mixed feelings about the changes: "It's changing from a nice collegial atmosphere to a mini city. If it's done and planned out well and maintains some charm using planning and architectural design, it will be a positive for the entire area."

But Kaleel has jumped on board, too. He's the agent and co-owner of Coastline Commons, which plans to seek approval for a mixed-use center of the same name on three acres along Federal Highway. Along with 150 residential units plus retail and commercial space, Kaleel will build a new home for a local church.

________________________--
looks like related's gota all the work there too, but damn the limit is 150 feet! :sleepy:

Wow, can't wait for this!!!!

Condos on Boynton dump site proposed
By Will Vash

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

BOYNTON BEACH — With scant space left for development, City Commissioner Muir C. "Mike" Ferguson is floating a proposal to put affordable "workforce" housing on the city's old garbage dump.

Ferguson proposes a $90 million housing project on the former Boynton Beach landfill, a 40-acre tract east of the city's golf course."Workforce housing is badly needed," Ferguson said. "The people going to work in the city are going home somewhere else."

The proposal would involve reclamation of the dump site and construction of 500 condominium units dedicated to affordable housing.

Priority would be given to public service employees, school teachers, health-care workers and senior citizens, according to the proposal.

Mayor Jerry Taylor said the concept is appealing, but the location is not.

"I wouldn't want to live on top of a dump site," Taylor said. "I don't know what people would."

City Commissioner Carl McKoy said he too is uneasy about placing housing on an old landfill.

"There are all kinds of environmental concerns," he said.

Haulers dumped garbage at the site from 1959 to 1977 and yard trash from 1977 to 1983. The waste ranges from 28 feet to 30 feet high, Ferguson said.

In 1998, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates the site with help from the Palm Beach County Health Department, authorized the city to continue regular monitoring of the ground water. The monitoring occurs twice a year, city officials said.

In 2000, residents of the Biltmore Terrace neighborhood worried about possible well-water contamination from the landfill, but the county health department found none.

Despite concerns of some about the feasibility of redeveloping the dump site, Ferguson said he has gotten positive input from experts in remediation.

"There's a way to do it," Ferguson said. "I've been assured it is possible."

Designating the abandoned landfill a brownfield site could provide a developer liability protection and tax credits for the potential cleanup of contaminated materials. The EPA defines a brownfield site as property where development "may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant."

Last month, Lake Worth city commissioners designated a former landfill in that city as a brownfield.

Maggie Smith, brownfield coordinator for Palm Beach County, said she sent Ferguson an assessment application, the first step toward studying the idea of building condos on Boynton Beach's former dump.

Lee Hoefert, state Department of Environmental Protection brownfield coordinator for Southeast Florida, said strict studies of the landfill would be needed before its feasibility for construction could be determined.

"The big thing is the structured stability of the soils underneath it," Hoefert said. "Also the amount of methane. It has the ability to accumulate... to an explosive level."

In neighboring Delray Beach, residents of the Carver Square development, built years ago on a former dump, complained for years that shifting soils beneath their homes were causing walls and foundations to crack. City officials are negotiating a buyout of 12 homes in the development.

Another major obstacle to the Boynton Beach site is vehicle access. The land is bordered on three sides by canals controlled by the Lake Worth Drainage District.

"That's a fundamental issue in this particular case," Smith said.

The most feasible access to the property would be made from the west on Jog Road and down Joe De Long Boulevard, extending into the golf course, according to the proposal.

Ferguson said given that the property is almost completely surrounded by county land, a joint effort between the city and county is a must.

He said he would be willing to act as "point man" on the project, partly because he might use the project as a model for similar private initiatives he hopes to spearhead in the state when he leaves the commission in late 2006.

"I don't see why it would be a conflict of interest after I leave office," Ferguson said. "This may be a niche for me."

Though he doesn't particularly like the site, Taylor said Ferguson's proposal likely will ignite further discussion about keeping the city affordable to the majority of workers.

"Most people can't afford a $300,000 house," Taylor said. "I think that's something we can strike for."

MARINA VILLAGE
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v289/enyers/marinavillge2.jpg

Ag Reserve taking final shape as uneasy mix of farms, homes
By Meghan Meyer

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Monday, April 11, 2005

West of Florida's Turnpike, just a few miles from the suburban strip malls of Boynton Beach, a bumpy dirt road cleaves a field of ankle-high bell peppers in rich black soil.

On the horizon, a cluster of cypress trees peeks through the mist.



Chris Matula/The Post

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Pickers at Thomas Produce haul tomatoes along Clint Moore Road in suburban Boca Raton as a mansion goes up nearby in The Oaks of Boca Raton. Critics have said such homes and agriculture couldn't coexist.
Ag reserve map
• View graphic explaining how the tract of land is developing.

"This is what the Ag Reserve was supposed to be," said environmentalist Joanne Davis, who heads a county committee that bought farmland. "Endless fields broken by cypress heads."

Near the end of the road, piles of fertile, dark earth dwarf a row of green peppers.

Here, they're growing houses.

"Look at that soil," Davis said, shaking her head. "They're just throwing it away."

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The American Farmland Trust estimates that farms in the United States are disappearing at the rate of 2 acres a minute. It's an oft-repeated story as suburban sprawl gnaws away at prime farmland across the country.

State and county governments have tried to slow the loss by creating agricultural reserves like the one west of Boynton Beach. But the name is deceptive: Not all of the land in an agricultural reserve is reserved for agriculture.

Critics argue that county commissioners opened the door to development in the reserve in 1995 when they established restrictive rules for building in the 21,000-acre rural enclave, which extends from Florida's Turnpike in southern Palm Beach County to the northernmost edge of the Everglades.

Since then, thousands of acres of farmland have given way to gated suburban communities.

In an effort to slow the sprawl, the county issued $100 million in bonds in 1999 to buy as much land as possible in the reserve. It has spent all but $12 million of that money.

After five years of land shopping, a picture has begun to emerge of what the rural enclave between Lantana and Clint Moore roads ultimately will look like:

About 60 percent of the land in the Agricultural Reserve will be protected as farmland or natural areas. A swath in the middle of the reserve and most of the land west of State Road 7 will stay green, providing a buffer for the national wildlife refuge to the west.

The southern reaches of the reserve will give way mostly to gated housing developments, some named after places in Italy, with towering fountains gushing water at their entrances. Thousands more homes will spring from former farmland despite the county's efforts to beat developers to it and despite strict limits on commercial and residential building.

That picture, however mottled it might appear, is exactly what the bond issue was supposed to achieve, officials said. The county has bought about 2,500 acres with the bond money, more than the 2,000 acres officials had hoped to buy in 1999.

The remaining $12 million won't buy much in an area where prices for an acre of land have climbed from $37,000 to $88,000 in five years. Officials say that countywide trend was fueled by scarce land and a hot real-estate market, not the government's land buys.

"No one expected everything could be protected," said Conservation Fund Vice President Matt Sexton, who's negotiating the land buys for the county. "But we wanted to protect as much as we could, and so far it looks like we'll be able to do that."

Good place to grow peppers

Dick Bowman sits in a golf cart next to the graying shell of his family's old dairy barn on Smith Sundy Road, about 2 miles west of the turnpike off Atlantic Avenue. He points to a white house with bright blue trim just south of the barn.

"I grew up in that house over there," he said. "My first job, in the third grade, was feeding the baby cows."

A foreman lives in Bowman's old house now. Bowman's father, Billy, sold the 938-acre farm to the county four years ago and bought a ranch in Okeechobee.

Dick Bowman leased the family farm back from the county. He grows vegetables and trees. Bowman built a new house for his wife and two young children, down the road. He couldn't afford to buy land to farm at market value, so he jumped at the chance to lease it.

"There's a lot of opportunity in this area still," Bowman said. "I like living here. I didn't think twice about the opportunity to lease the land back."

The county has leased much of the land it bought with the bond money back to farmers, bringing in about $1.45 million a year. The county plans to save that money in case it needs it to finalize a land purchase.

After the county has finished buying land, the lease money will go to support agriculture projects. The lease program allows many of the younger members of the region's old farming families, such as Dick Bowman, to continue working the land.

Dick Bowman's grandfather bought the land in 1957 after he sold the family's farm near Miami. At the time, everyone assumed that farmers in Palm Beach County also eventually would sell to developers, Bowman said. The pace of change surprised the close-knit group of farmers who have worked the land for generations.

When the county started buying land five years ago, farms covered 11,000 of the 21,000 acres in the reserve. Now it's down to 6,500 acres, said Arthur Kirstein, agriculture coordinator for the Palm Beach County Extension Service. Still, farming hasn't vanished yet.

"There's a misconception that farmland has disappeared there," he said. "It has not. We still have funds available and we're still purchasing land."

Historically, farmland has dominated the landscape in the southeastern part of the county. Farmers who have lived here longer than two decades fondly remember driving to the coast along Atlantic Avenue, without encountering a stop sign until Military Trail.

The region is sandwiched ideally between the wetlands of the wildlife refuge to the west and the ocean to the east, where the Gulf Stream comes closer to the United States than anywhere except Cape Hatteras. That's why eastern Palm Beach County stays a few degrees warmer than the western half. It's an ideal climate for growing high-value tomatoes and peppers that fetch five times more an acre in sales than the sugar cane grown in the western half of the county, Kirstein said.

Consequently, farmers in the Agricultural Reserve pay about $750 an acre each year in rent, three times higher than what farmers pay in the western part of the county.

"When you are dealing with very sensitive vegetables like you are there, the difference is night and day," Kirstein said. "Tomatoes in Immokalee could be freezing and we still might be producing tomatoes here."

Good place to migrate

It's late afternoon and the animals are putting on their evening show at the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge just west of the Agricultural Reserve.

As refuge manager Mark Musaus steers a pickup along the popular marsh trail on the eastern edge of the refuge, he spots a half-submerged alligator in a canal, a flock of teal-winged ducks floating in the marsh and a great blue heron preening on the side of the trail. He stops to let a yellow-bellied turtle cross the road.

The Agricultural Reserve's strict rules for development have kept houses away from the refuge, buffering it with farmland and natural preserves, Musaus said. The federal government and the South Florida Water Management District own much of the land that borders the refuge.

Without restrictions on building, the privately owned pepper farms skirting the refuge entrance could be sold to developers. Displaced animals would move from the fields into the refuge, Musaus said. Lights from the new houses would disrupt nighttime routines, and the animals might leave.

The specter of red tile roofs looming to the west would ruin the experience of walking the marsh trail, where visitors now can see open space as far as the horizon.

"Having a denser population would put a greater demand on the refuge," Musaus said. "The closer you have development, the greater the chance for disturbance, especially with lights."

Land prices in the reserve, while high, remain lower than prices for land just outside its boundaries, where building restrictions are more lax. Even with the relatively cheaper prices, and even though the tomatoes are pulling in five times as much as sugar cane, it's still hard to continue farming land worth $100,000 an acre.

For those who would like to retire, it's hard to turn down developers who call several times a day.

Developers who want to build in the reserve are required to cluster houses on 40 percent of their land and preserve the rest. Clusters are restricted to one house an acre. There is a loophole to the 40 percent rule: Developers may build more houses in their planned communities as long as they preserve other vacant property they own elsewhere in the reserve. As developers seized that option, a large agricultural area emerged in the middle and west of the reserve, where land prices were cheapest.

Builder GL Homes recently stretched the loophole. In a controversial deal with the water management district, the company was allowed to buy land outside the Agricultural Reserve to fulfill its conservation requirement. County officials said that won't happen again.

The county's land-buying committee recommended against purchases in the more expensive southern end of the reserve, where homes have coveted Boca Raton addresses. The committee members wanted to get the most land possible with the money they had. It helped that the county bought a lot of land before prices went through the roof, Sexton said.

The preserve land the county has assembled in the middle of the reserve has one glaring 280-acre hole. Kenco Communities has proposed building an equestrian neighborhood on the rectangle of land surrounded by property the county bought for preservation.

The Kenco land remains high on the county's list of priorities, Sexton said, but the $12 million left in the county's pot wouldn't begin to pay for it.

"I am talking to them," he said, "and I'm hopeful we can pull something together."

Good place to grow houses

Bulldozers churn the earth next to a field ringed with sugar cane shielding sensitive crops from the wind. It's an increasingly common sight on Atlantic Avenue. A blue sign declares this the future domain of 385 single-family, Mediterranean-style houses built by the development company Ascot.

Next door, at the northwest corner of Lyons Road, Ascot plans to build a "traditional marketplace development," one of two allowed in the Agricultural Reserve.

Ascot's will have a movie theater, stores, restaurants, a bank, parking garages, offices and apartments. Before it builds the marketplace, Ascot must widen two-lane Atlantic Avenue to four lanes to accommodate the traffic.

"It's going to be a place where you can go and spend the whole day," Ascot principal Teri Gevinson said. "We definitely want to make it a place of interest for the whole community."

Gevinson lives in the reserve, in Rio Poco, an older neighborhood off State Road 7. She considers herself lucky to have grabbed one of the last pieces of land available for development.

"There's no land left," Gevinson said. "If you're not approved now, it's not going to happen."

The demographics of the area are changing as suburbanites move in, demanding services. A free health clinic founded to serve undocumented immigrants has reported seeing fewer farmworkers and more patients who work at nurseries, as landscapers and on construction jobs.

Critics of the county's plans feared million-dollar homes and noisy, dusty farm equipment could not coexist. The land was zoned agricultural until the county allowed development there. All of it still should be farmland, Joanne Davis said, but she'll take what she can get.

"I think we did as good a job as we could under the circumstances," she said.

County Commissioner Burt Aaronson, whose district covers much of the reserve, said the pattern of development has proceeded according to plan.

"I'm very happy with the way it's progressing," Aaronson said. "Of course we'd like to be able to purchase more, but with the cost of land going up throughout the county and throughout the country, it was difficult. Still, we've achieved most of our goals."

Boca Raton attorney Barry Silver, who sued over plans for the reserve in the 1990s, remains a critic of the county commission's actions there.

Silver alleges that commissioners sold out to developers who donated money to their campaigns. Developers and builders contributed at least $180,000 to commissioners' most recent campaigns, according to reports filed with the elections office. Growers and agricultural interests also contributed at least $39,000 to campaigns, according to the same reports.

"The allowance of any residential in that area was the death knell for agriculture," Silver said. "They know that."

Gevinson said the predictions turned out to be false. New homes have meshed with the farms that have operated in the reserve for generations, she said.

"Looking at our development site, some of the nicest lots are the ones that back up to the conservation easement," she said. "That's going to be farmland for a minimum of 99 years, probably forever. I would pay more for that lot than one on the lake."

Sitting in his golf cart next to rows of young palm trees, with herons and ibises swooping just overhead, Dick Bowman said he's happy with the county's program. Bulldozers are carving up the land just a few hundred yards down the road, but for now his view remains unobstructed by the red-tile roofs and satellite dishes of suburbia.

The county gave him what he wanted: a core area where farmers can go about their business without being bothered. And the farmers who sold their land were fairly compensated.

"The program has worked," Bowman said. "They succeeded in saving some farmland for future generations."

Just drove through Boynton on US1 last week, and expected to see construction-mania. Instead, I saw one active construction sight.

In fact, there is precious little evidence of a building boom, just to judge by the drive on US1 between WPB and FTL.

Curious.

This should be under west palm beach development news.

no it shouldn't boynton beach is not wpb

Is it miami? not the last time I looked