Hollywood's activity center is out of units. This infill borrows 36

Hollywood planning staff is recommending approval of a four-story, 36-unit apartment building at 2306 Van Buren Street, filed by 102 SW 1st LLC. Buried in the staff report is the fact that matters to every developer working the corridor: the Regional Activity Center has hit its unit capacity limit, and these 36 units have to come out of the City’s Flexibility Unit allocation.

Why it matters

Hollywood’s Regional Activity Center was designed to concentrate density near transit and away from single-family neighborhoods, and it worked well enough that the district is now bumping its ceiling. When a RAC runs out of units, the binding constraint on a project stops being FAR, height or parking and becomes an administrative allocation the city controls. That changes how a site should be underwritten. Two identical parcels can carry very different risk depending on whether units are still available to assign when the application lands.

There is a second, quieter lesson in the report. Under regulations effective August 18, 2025, site plans under 30,000 square feet or under 30 units get administrative review. At 36 units and roughly 36,668 square feet, this application sits just over both thresholds and therefore requires a public board hearing. A sponsor optimizing for schedule rather than unit count has a real decision to make there.

The numbers

The site is about 20,550 square feet, or 0.47 acres, zoned DH-2. The building is 45 feet and four stories with roughly 35,930 square feet of gross floor area, which works out to about 77 units per acre. The mix leans small: 27 one-bedrooms, three two-bedrooms and six three-bedrooms, averaging about 824 square feet.

Parking is 49 spaces, or roughly 1.36 per unit, achieved with tandem spaces and parking lifts assigned to the two- and three-bedroom units, plus four guest spaces and two accessible spaces. The plan provides about 5,779 square feet of pervious area. The applicant held its public outreach meeting on December 5, 2024.

What’s next

Staff recommends approving the design outright and the site plan with one condition: the applicant must commit to the mural shown on elevation sheet A.26 to satisfy the city’s public art requirement, and dropping the artwork sends the building back to the board for fresh design review. Final public art approval runs through the Public Arts Review Committee before the master building permit. The board hears it August 4, the same session that takes up the 166-acre Emerald Hills golf course rezoning. Track the market at the South Florida hub.