Amid Florida’s foreclosures, CityPlace endures
ROBERT STEUTEVILLE SEP. 1, 2009
CityPlace South Tower, a 20-story residential building just outside the CityPlace mixed-use development in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida, went through what was described as a “friendly foreclosure” this summer. The Related Group, developer of the 420-unit condominium tower, handed the property over to a consortium of partners led by Toronto-based Scotia Capital.
Related had lined up sales contracts for 367 of the units when the project was under construction. But when the building — which some say is out of scale with CityPlace — opened in the summer of 2008, buyers backed out; the Florida housing market was collapsing. By this July, with Florida’s condo market still a shambles, only 39 units had been sold. Now that the foreclosure has been completed, Related, although removed from its ownership position, continues to manage the building.
Meanwhile, CityPlace’s first high-rise office building, the 18-story CityPlace Tower developed by Related and Crocker Partners LLC, has fared considerably better, leasing 89 percent of its 300,000 sq. ft.
CityPlace as a whole “appears to be surviving OK,” says Dana Little, a designer who was on the Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. team that planned the 72-acre development in 1993. “There has been a great deal of reworking of the tenant mix since its opening [in 2000],” Little says, citing the departure of some high-end retailers, an emphasis on home furnishings during the economic boom years, and more recently the opening of more restaurants. Vacancies are few, Little says, and empty spaces tend to be in locations with the least foot traffic.
“We walk there almost every weekend,” says Little, now a full-time consultant to the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council. “It is pretty active. There are always people in the plaza.” The Himmel Theater — a cultural center occupying a beautiful Spanish Colonial-style church from 1926 — holds youth-oriented Sunday services that draw many people. An improv comedy club recently opened after a significant expansion.
“CityPlace remains one of the few places that I am aware of in South Florida where you can actually watch people walking down the street with bags of groceries,” Little points out. An urban-scale Publix supermarket stands at the north end of CityPlace. Okeechobee Boulevard, which was laid out to accommodate tall buildings, “is becoming more and more of a walking boulevard,” he says.
By contrast, South Florida lifestyle centers that were designed in accordance with what Little calls “the fried-egg model” — a pedestrian-oriented shopping complex surrounded by acres of surface parking— are having trouble. One such lifestyle center, a swanky, 350,000 sq. ft. complex called Downtown at the Gardens, in Palm Beach Gardens, was foreclosed on in July, just four years after Menin Development Companies opened it with the grandiose claim that “we want to be part of the mainframe of people’s lives.” The mainframe crashed.
“The glory of CityPlace, in my opinion, is that it was intentionally designed for the city to grow into it,” Little says. CityPlace occupies land assembled under former mayor Nancy Graham. It includes a convention center and several hundred apartments, townhouses, flexible-use lofts, and condo units (not counting those in South Tower).
Related had lined up sales contracts for 367 of the units when the project was under construction. But when the building — which some say is out of scale with CityPlace — opened in the summer of 2008, buyers backed out; the Florida housing market was collapsing. By this July, with Florida’s condo market still a shambles, only 39 units had been sold. Now that the foreclosure has been completed, Related, although removed from its ownership position, continues to manage the building.
Meanwhile, CityPlace’s first high-rise office building, the 18-story CityPlace Tower developed by Related and Crocker Partners LLC, has fared considerably better, leasing 89 percent of its 300,000 sq. ft.
CityPlace as a whole “appears to be surviving OK,” says Dana Little, a designer who was on the Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. team that planned the 72-acre development in 1993. “There has been a great deal of reworking of the tenant mix since its opening [in 2000],” Little says, citing the departure of some high-end retailers, an emphasis on home furnishings during the economic boom years, and more recently the opening of more restaurants. Vacancies are few, Little says, and empty spaces tend to be in locations with the least foot traffic.
“We walk there almost every weekend,” says Little, now a full-time consultant to the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council. “It is pretty active. There are always people in the plaza.” The Himmel Theater — a cultural center occupying a beautiful Spanish Colonial-style church from 1926 — holds youth-oriented Sunday services that draw many people. An improv comedy club recently opened after a significant expansion.
“CityPlace remains one of the few places that I am aware of in South Florida where you can actually watch people walking down the street with bags of groceries,” Little points out. An urban-scale Publix supermarket stands at the north end of CityPlace. Okeechobee Boulevard, which was laid out to accommodate tall buildings, “is becoming more and more of a walking boulevard,” he says.
By contrast, South Florida lifestyle centers that were designed in accordance with what Little calls “the fried-egg model” — a pedestrian-oriented shopping complex surrounded by acres of surface parking— are having trouble. One such lifestyle center, a swanky, 350,000 sq. ft. complex called Downtown at the Gardens, in Palm Beach Gardens, was foreclosed on in July, just four years after Menin Development Companies opened it with the grandiose claim that “we want to be part of the mainframe of people’s lives.” The mainframe crashed.
“The glory of CityPlace, in my opinion, is that it was intentionally designed for the city to grow into it,” Little says. CityPlace occupies land assembled under former mayor Nancy Graham. It includes a convention center and several hundred apartments, townhouses, flexible-use lofts, and condo units (not counting those in South Tower).
