Related Group advanced a revised plan to build Portofino Hollywood, a beachfront residential development, after adding workforce housing to qualify the development for expedited approval under the state’ Live Local Act.
The Hollywood City Commission voted 5-2 Wednesday to amend the city’s development agreement with Related, allowing the Miami-based company to drop earlier plans for an all-condo building and instead develop a residential tower with 124 market-rate condos and 86 workforce housing rentals.
The development site is at 1301 South Ocean Drive, where Related has a 99-year ground lease for a city-owned site. The residential complex would sit next to a municipal community center that Related agreed to build for Hollywood.
By allocating 40 percent of the units in the planned building to workforce housing, Related qualified its development for expedited municipal approval under the state’s Live Local Act, enacted to encourage the development of housing more Floridians can afford.
The Florida Legislature recently passed an amended version of the Live Local Act that permits qualifying developments with workforce housing on church-owned land and municipal property, as well as commercial and industrial sites. The amended version of the law is pending final approval by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The height of the Portofino Hollywood development, the extent to which condos and workforce housing units with below-market rents are integrated, and other design elements are pending a finalized site plan.
The below-market rentals will be reserved for people who earn up to 120 percent of area median income in Broward County, which is $106,440 for a one-person household. According to amended text in the city’s development agreement with Related Group, “ongoing priority” for these rentals will be “given to City of Hollywood police officers, firefighters and city employees, and then to local hospital workers and teachers who meet the income eligibility requirements.”
In 2022, the Hollywood City Commission approved Related Group’s earlier plan to build a 26-story condo on the 4-acre site at 1301 South Ocean Drive and rebuild the Hollywood Culture and Community Center there.
But Broward County stalled that plan about three months ago. The City of Hollywood asked the Broward County Planning Council to clarify the land-use designation of the development site due to inconsistencies between maps the city and the county were using.
The county’s planning council decided in February that the site’s land-use designation is “community facility,” not the “medium-high 25” that would allow Related’s development.
But by winning Hollywood’s permission to pursue a Live Local Act development, Related and the city negated the county’s jurisdiction over the development.
Related is led by founding executive chairman Jorge M. Pérez and his sons Jon Paul Pérez, who serves as president and CEO of the company, and Nicholas Pérez, president of the company’s condo division.
“It’s just a loophole for developers, that’s all Live Local is,” Drew Martin, an executive of the Sierra Club Loxahatchee Group in Lake Worth, told the commissioners at their meeting on Wednesday.
Martin was one of 30 members of the public who spoke at the commission meeting in opposition to amending the city’s development deal with Related. He and others cited the site’s vulnerability to storms and rising sea levels.
“It’s a barrier island and an evacuation zone,” said Hollywood City Commissioner Caryl Shuham, who voted against amending the city’s development agreement with Related.
“We should not be invoking the Live Local Act as a municipality in Florida,” Shuham said. “The Live Local Act is a huge erosion of the ability of Florida cities and counties to govern themselves.”