City of Hollywood's Park Avenue RFP has potential to transform southern Hollywood & SE Broward County, adding a truly dynamic element to area's multi-use real estate developments. SFBJ's Brian Bandell asks the question best:
"What will the city prioritize, the most money possible from a real estate transaction, or a project that will generate the most economic activity or community benefit?"
Today's blog post is below the two follow-up tweets to Brian's initial tweet.
Finalizing my analysis of @cohgov's Evaluation Comm.'s initial comments re #HollywoodFL's Park Road site that drew 4 such different proposals 4 transforming that area of #HollywoodFL, southern #Broward.— HallandaleBeachBlog (@hbbtruth) August 17, 2018
Oral presentations = next Wed., my analysis up on blog by Monday by Noon! 😊 pic.twitter.com/Afx936uw6p
I'm interested to see what you think. Two developers proposed zero payment for the land. What will the city prioritize, the most money possible from a real estate transaction, or a project that will generate the most economic activity or community benefit?— Brian Bandell (@SFBJRealEstate) August 17, 2018
The four proposals ran the gamut from Alpha to Omega in terms of painting a pretty picture on what could emerge on that city-owned site, a parcel that many of you longtime readers of this blog know from numerous conversations I've had with you over the years, or via lots of fact-filled emails, that I've long believed that it, if done correctly, quite literally, transform that part of southern Hollywood and southern Broward County.
As you can tell, though, I did not get this blog post up by Noon yesterday as I'd planned. :-(
Also, a few pages of my comments got lost on a memory card that somehow got corrupted -no seriously- so I'm afraid this is necessarily much shorter than I'd originally planned.
The developer's oral presentations start at 8 am tomorrow morning in Room 215 at the City of Hollywood City Hall.
For reasons not worth getting into here, I will not be at the meeting. :-(
But expect that quite a few well-informed friends and civic activists I know will be sending me reports during the meeting and during breaks.
As of the other day, the idea was that each developer would get roughly 90 minutes to present their view of the future.
Each respondent developer's proposal was several hundred pages and it was slow slogging at times, but on the other hand, many pages were extended pubic relations-friendly versions of the developer's own website, variations of previous RFP propsals to other cities or govt. entities throughout the U.S., or lots and lots of commercial real estate-style photos.
So, I did NOT read every page, especially if the page or section was not really that germane to this proposal, per se, or seemed like extended schmoozing by other means, like copies of newspaper aticles for projects completed in other cities and patting-themselves on the back.
There is an awful lot to think about and talk about in considering if the City of Hollywood is going to get the interesting dynamic change which I think it needs there, or will accept something considerably less!
On Friday, via a tweet to me that I didn't respond to because I'd already logged off by then, Brian actually asked the most important question that I believe is actually hanging over this project, and asking it in such a clear way that I'm going to say it again here:
"I'm interested to see what you think. Two developers proposed zero payment for the land. What will the city prioritize, the most money possible from a real estate transaction, or a project that will generate the most economic activity or community benefit?
I tweeted a thread of some early thoughts of mine about this project a few weeks ago at:
https://twitter.com/hbbtruth/status/1025080697332097025
On the morning of Thursday July 19th I attended an often-fascinating, often-slow-moving five-and-a-half hour public meeting at the City of Hollywood City Hall regarding what the City is calling their Park Road Redevelopment RFD.
Located at a city-owned site at 1600 S. Park Road, it’s better known by most of us living in southern Broward County as the northwest corner of Park Road and Pembroke Road, across the street from the city-owned Orangebrook Golf Course on the north side, and right near the very large local Coca-Cola Bottling plant on the south side, with its longtime huge replica of an iconic Coca Cola-filled glass bottle near its entrance.
Conveniently that intersection is also less than a mile to 1-95, which is both its blessing and its curse.
The south side of the street is actually the City of
Pembroke Park, not Hollywood, and in either direction, is home to lots of nondescript
commercial development but very little of the sort that would ever cause anyone
from immediately outside the area to ever swing by and see what’s new: i.e. a
large number of gas stations and lots of smaller warehouses that are home to all
manner of auto and mechanical repair shops, small manufacturing, offices or retail
storage units.
To be honest, there's nothing very exciting on the south side of the street and the north side of the street is nothing to brag about either, going in both directions for a bit. There is almost no pedestrian activity to be found there because the sorts of larger retail stores like Target or dine-in or fast food restaurants in the immediate area are located farther north on Hollywood Blvd. in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of the city.
The city’s current Police Dept. HQ occupies a pretty nice
tract on the southeast corner of Park and Hollywood Blvd., opposite all that
busy retail and upscale professional office activity I spoke of, with a good
amount of pedestrian activity, so as the city is hoping to get voter’s to
approve a bond issue this Fall that might fund the construction of a new Police
HQ, if the city relocates the Police HQ, that good-sized corner tract suddenly
becomes one of the most desirable pieces of real estate in Hollywood.
I say that because besides the high amount of passing automobile traffic, there’s also nearby neighborhoods with a large number of upper middle-class apt. and condo complexes
within a ten minute walk that could make that a good investment IF it’s
something unique or, dare I say it, original.
Those same existing apt. and condo complexes and their well-heeled residents are also the same people who’d be the nearest neighbors of any new project built at the city’s RFP at Park Road and Pembroke Road. That central fact, good access to I-95 and plenty of upper middle-class consumers within a short distance makes me think that it’s hard to conceive of a situation where the Hollywood City Commission would prefer an industrial park, however functional and attractive, to a fun and consumer-friendly multi-use complex that not only draws local residents to it, but also draws consumer dollars from other cities within a 10-20 mile radius, something not currently true of any place I can think of on Pembroke or Hollywood Blvd.
Also, there is currently on the books approval for 600-plus new homes will be built nearby at what is a former golf course.
There are a few nice restaurants in the immediate area, a place I know very well, but are they truly special, unique, or something that genuinely causes a degree of excitement? Well, not so much.
Think about that as you read my description of the developer proposals an the city’s five-member evaluation Committee that has people on it from various city departments and with an array of disciplines to try to give the Hollywood City Commission two very good proposals for them to decide between in the coming months.
For people who live in the area or just west of there in Miramar or Pembroke Pines, it's also well-known for being the home of some hellacious traffic jams because so many people use it to get to
I-95
The site is currently the headquarters for the city’s
Dept. of Public Works (DPW) and is more accurately known by most longtime area
residents as a brownfield that once was home of the city’s incinerator. So, the
first thing you need to know is that there's residual waste in the soil that means
that some degree of remediation will be necessary to make it suitable for more
general public purposes.
I have long been personally interested in that site because of all the places in Hollywood that were not on the beach, near Young Circle or Downtown, that was the site that I thought was best suited for being the hoe of a #tech village, but that seems unlikely to materialize as I once hoped.
So, on with the show, including some selected pages from the four proposals, including cover pages.
The first proposal discussed and analyzed by
Eval Comm. -but with no scoring yet- was from @Prologis, which was quite
impressive, obviously, given their size, global marketing capabilities,
experience in dealing with environmental challenges, an important consideration given that the site is the former site of Hollywood DPW's incinerator.
The second bid was from a team comprised of (Louis) Birdman Real Estate Development of Hallandale Beach, Collarmele Partners of Fort Lauderdale and Meyers Real Estate Group. The group contact person is, I believe, the same guy who was VP at the Diplomat Golf Course in Hallandale Beach.
The third proposal came from ImmoCorp Ventures of Aventura, i.e. Gilbert Benhamou, who has been involved in developing many upscale retail areas throughout the U.S. I'm personally familiar with, including in Charlottesville, VA, home of UVA, where one of my nieces went to college.
To be honest, their proposal is the one that I liked best in the early-going because their team includes many people that I am familiar with, including architect Kobi Karp, who has had some projects in Hallandale beach.
To me, frankly, it seems the most creative, transformative, and shows the most potential to draw consumer dollars to that area of Broward.
But will that be what most appeals to the Hollywood City Commission long-term vs short-term benefits?
I hope so, but who can really say months in advance?
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The fourth proposal came from Bridge Development Partners of Miami, who proposed two Class A office buildings. There seemed to be a consensus within the Evaluation Committee that the firm has managed to consistently have a "quite compelling" tenant mix in their past projects that came to fruition.
But the one thing that stood out most to me from the many comments made during the Evaluation Committee's discussion of this group's proposal, one voiced from the rep from DPW and echoed by others on the Comm. as well, was that this proposal seems to NOT have really come to term in their first effort to address the problem/solution to the city's DPW facility there. Keep facility, build a new one there or relocate and build new HQ elsewhere in the city?
I should mention that I thought that Paul Bassar, the Director of Procurement & Contract Compliance for the City of Hollywood, who ran/moderated the July 19th meeting I attended, did a very good job of keeping some very smart and very opinionated people on-track, like a good railroad conductor, so that the meeting didn't run even longer than the five-and-half hours it actually took from beginning to end, counting breaks after each discussion.
@SFBJRealEstate Some informed thoughts re Wed.'s important Park Avenue Redevelopment mtg @cohgov City Hall @ 8 am: It has potential to transform southern #HollywoodFL/SE #Broward, adding positive/dynamic element to area's multi-use ReaEstate #development https://t.co/BXQVOg4eX3— HallandaleBeachBlog (@hbbtruth) August 21, 2018
