Cornerstone wins approval for mixed-income apartment complex in Pompano Beach

Pompano Beach approved a mixed-use, mixed-income multifamily project with 121 apartments, almost half of them rent-restricted units.

City commissioners voted Tuesday to approve a development agreement between the Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency and Cornerstone Group, a Hollywood-based affordable housing developer.

Coral Gables-based architecture firm Burgos Lanza designed Sonata Apartments, a three-building multifamily development with 31 one-bedroom units, 59 two-bedroom units and 31 three-bedrooms units. The apartments will range in size from 696 square feet to 1,230 square feet.

Cornerstone’s development agreement with the city requires that at least 15 units at Sonata Apartments be designated as market-rate units, and at least 57 as rent-restricted units for tenants whose income is equal to or below 70 percent of area median income.

Cornerstone will decide how to designate the other 49 units. If the developer designates more apartments as market-rate units, it will forfeit affordable-housing subsidies, Mayor Rex Hardin said.

“This is a tax-credit housing project that has funding approved through the Florida Housing Finance Corporation,” said Cassandra LeMasurier, real estate manager of the Pompano Beach city government.

The Sonata development site on Dixie Highway in Pompano Beach is near the interchange of Atlantic Avenue and I-95. The nine-parcel development site is on the west side of Dixie Highway between Northwest 6th Street and Northwest 8th Court.

Cornerstone, led by Lenny Wolfe, will build Sonata Apartments on six city-owned parcels that the developer will lease for 50 years, and three adjacent parcels that are under contract for $3.25 million. The three parcels are owned by entities controlled by Eighteen Capital Group, a Kansas-based private equity firm and family office that focuses on real estate investments.

Construction is scheduled to start in September and conclude in October 2022, according to the development agreement. The three buildings will range from three stories to eight stories.

One of the three buildings will have 3,500 square feet of ground-floor commercial space. It is scheduled to open in February 2022 on the six city-owned parcels, which front Dixie Highway.

The budgeted total cost of the 117,756-square-foot development is $35.8 million, including $23.5 million in construction costs.

Among other sources of funding, Cornerstone will get a $783,250 loan from the city’s affordable housing trust fund and a $1.5 million contribution from the Pompano Beach CRA to pay for public infrastructure costs.

Pompano Beach also will reimburse Cornerstone up to $420,000 for relocating a drainage pond from the six city-owned parcels to an area just west of the development site.

An active South Florida developer, Cornerstone last year sold an affordable housing complex in Lauderdale Lakes for $17 million.