13th Floor Clears 30-Story Flagler Village Tower in Fort Lauderdale

The Fort Lauderdale City Commission voted Tuesday night to approve a site plan for a 30-story, 350-unit multifamily tower that 13th Floor Investments plans to build at 500 NE 3rd Avenue in Flagler Village, just north of downtown.

Why it matters

The commission’s approval came as a quasi-judicial resolution, Case No. UDP-S23067, filed under the applicant name 501 NE Holdings, LP, an entity tied to the site’s ownership by 13th Floor and West Palm Beach-based Wexford Real Estate Investors. Along with the Site Plan Level II permit, the commission granted an Alternate Design Request letting the tower’s floorplate run 17,669 square feet, 41 percent above the 12,500-square-foot limit that applies by right in the Downtown Regional Activity Center. That deviation is the mechanism that let a 30-story tower fit the site at all, and it is the kind of discretionary call other Flagler Village landowners will now point to when they ask the city for the same room.

The numbers

The approved plan calls for 350 residential units, up from the 345 units 13th Floor originally filed for in January 2024, atop a seven-story parking podium with 512 structured spaces. The project also carries about 3,500 square feet of ground-floor retail. The site sits at the corner of NE 3rd Avenue and NE 5th Street in South Florida’s Flagler Village submarket, one of several towers in the neighborhood’s active development pipeline.

What’s next

13th Floor has not announced a construction start date or financing for the tower, and the approval covers site plan and design, not building permits. The next filings to watch are the building permit applications with the city and any construction loan or equity announcement from 13th Floor or Wexford. The 41 percent floorplate deviation the commission granted here is also worth tracking on its own: any other Flagler Village site plan that comes before the commission citing this approval as precedent will be a sign the city is willing to keep granting it.