Astor Progresso Village Site Plan Reaches Fort Lauderdale Dais

Fort Lauderdale’s City Commission takes up a Level II site plan tonight for Astor Progresso Village, a 249-unit apartment tower proposed on a former auto salvage yard at 4 NW 7th Street, in the Northwest Regional Activity Center. The item bundles a site plan approval with an alternate design request and a parking reduction into one quasi-judicial resolution, filed under Case No. UDP-S25020 by an entity whose paper trail leads back to Midtown Capital Partners.

Why it matters

The Northwest RAC sits away from the Flagler Village and downtown blocks that dominate Fort Lauderdale’s pipeline, and this filing shows entitlement activity pushing into that zone. The applicant of record, Advantis MCA Flagler Triangle LLC, is a Delaware entity registered with the state in October 2023. Its Sunbiz filing lists its manager as another LLC, MCA MDF LLC, at 175 SW 7th Street, Suite 2112, Miami, the identical headquarters address Midtown Capital Partners lists for itself. Midtown, founded in 2010 by Alexander Saieh and Alejandro Velez, is the real developer behind the title entity. The site itself was a salvage yard until Midtown paid $9.4 million for it in late 2022, land banked ahead of an entitlement push that only reaches the Commission now, nearly three years later.

The numbers

As designed, the 12-story tower rises roughly 127 feet and totals about 341,635 square feet, with 249 units split between 180 studios, 8 junior one-bedrooms, 22 one-bedrooms and 39 two-bedrooms. Plans call for 1,861 square feet of ground-floor retail fronting NW 7th Street and 309 parking spaces, including a basement level, uncommon for a South Florida podium building. At roughly 1.2 spaces per unit, that ratio is the practical shape of the parking reduction the Commission is being asked to approve alongside the alternate design request. The project team includes architect CUBE3, landscape architect EcoPlan, civil and traffic engineer Kimley-Horn, and land-use counsel Greenberg Traurig.

What’s next

The Commission’s own agenda has drafted both an approval resolution and a denial resolution for item 26-0745, standard practice for a quasi-judicial hearing but a reminder that tonight’s vote is not a formality. A yes vote clears Midtown’s site plan for the Miami submarket around the FEC tracks, an area with far less built multifamily than Flagler Village a few blocks east. A no vote, or a continuance, would leave a $9.4 million land assemblage sitting entitled-only for another cycle. Either outcome is worth tracking as a signal of how far west of downtown Fort Lauderdale’s next wave of apartment construction is willing to go.