Affiliated Development OK’d for Fort Lauderdale Rentals

Affiliated Development won city approval to revise and revive another developer’s plan for a 340-unit apartment building with an affordable-housing component in Fort Lauderdale’s Cypress Creek area.

The Fort Lauderdale City Commission voted Tuesday night to amend a site plan for the apartment building in the Cypress Creek area of Fort Lauderdale with a larger percentage of affordable housing.

The development site, at 400 North Corporate Drive, includes a parking lot next to a 298-room Westin hotel built in 1986. The hotel is not part of the dev site and will remain.

The owner is TPG Hotels, Resorts and Marinas, whose entity paid $40.3 million in 2007 to acquire the site, according to property records. 

Fort Lauderdale-based Affiliated Development has a contract to purchase the 6.6-acre development site, Jeff Burns, CEO and co-founder of Affiliated, told The Real Deal. Vertical construction of the eight-story apartment building is expected to start in about a year, he said.

The amended site plan keeps the total number of apartments unchanged at 340 and expands the affordable housing component of the apartment development from 51 apartments with below-market rents to 136, or 40 percent of the total number of apartments.

The approval allows altering the design of the planned apartment building, called The Cypress, and reduces its height from 12 stories to eight.

Burns said construction costs drove the decision to opt for a shorter building, and tax incentives encouraged Affiliated to increase the amount of affordable housing in The Cypress. In August, the Fort Lauderdale City Commission agreed to reimburse 100 percent of property tax generated by the development each year for 15 years. Burns said the property qualifies for a Broward County incentive that annually reimburses 50 percent of the incremental property tax over a 30-year period.

Burns said 102 of the apartments with below-market rents would be reserved for tenants earning 80 percent to 120 percent of area median income, and 34 would be reserved for tenants earning 10 percent to 100 percent of AMI. Median income for a family of four in Broward County is $101,400 a year, according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Dallas-based Trinsic Residential had the development site in Cypress Creek under contract to purchase when the original site plan was approved in March 2024. Trinsic planned to build a 12-story apartment building on the site and to designate 51 of the 340 apartments, or 15 percent of them, as affordable housing units with below-market rents.

At that time, Chad Bradshaw, Trinsic’s managing director in Florida, told TRD that his company was hoping to start construction by the end of 2024. But Bradshaw also expressed concern about a lack of “favorable [financing] terms out there for doing large commercial projects.”

Trinsic ultimately decided not to acquire the site, and soon after, Affiliated Development replaced Trinsic as the contract buyer, Burns said.