The city is arching forward with its long-awaited multimillion dollar main street project and construction could begin within two years.
“It’s a go,” said Mayor Harry Dressler. “It’s been 10 years in the making. The city needs a place where people can live and dine and play on the grass with their children. There’s no other place in the city that has the amenities that has what this will have.”
The new vision calls for 400 one, two and three-bedroom residential units, 35,000 square feet of stores and restaurants and a small park at Tamarac Village, off Commercial Boulevard. The construction will peak at four stories.
On Wednesday the City Commission is expected to sign an agreement with a master developer, JKM Developers, whose job will be to both find tenants for the commercial space and build the 23-acre project that would create the city’s first city center.
A decade ago, the city began planning Tamarac Village — what was once called “Main Street” — along Northwest 57th Street, with the expectation of providing shops, restaurants, offices and homes, such as villas or condos.
Between 2006 and 2013 the city spent $16.6 million to buy 17 properties for Tamarac Village, including empty land, an old bank building, and a synagogue.
The vision has changed over time. Instead of stretching between Northwest 94th Avenue and University Drive, the project is now confined to the border of Pine Island Road. Plans to build an overpass to ease pedestrian traffic have been scratched. So was an early plan to assess a handful of surrounding businesses, including a nursing home, hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for it all, which quickly became a public relations nightmare for the plan’s visionaries.
The villas and condos are now rental units. And most notably, instead of a mixed-use development where residential units sit on top of stores, the buildings will now be separated.
That’s because a five or six story building with shops on the ground floor and residential space on top to create the image of urban living turned out to be too expensive to build, said City Manager Michael Cernech. The rentals planned now could range from $1,200 to $2,000 a month — lower than the tightly packed eastern cities, but what the market in Tamarac would allow.
Cernech said once completed the project would add to the tax base, and create a destination spot. Without this project, the area would have become “another row of fast food and gas” stations, he said.