JBL Pitches 736 Apartments for Rivertowne Square in Deerfield Beach
The Hollywood-based landlord bought the half-vacant Winn-Dixie-anchored center for $18.85 million and is now seeking a rezoning, plat and site plan approval to redevelop it.
JBL Asset Management has filed plans to demolish part of its Rivertowne Square shopping center in Deerfield Beach and replace it with 736 apartments across two 8-story towers, according to Connect CRE. The Hollywood-based landlord bought the 13-acre, Winn-Dixie-anchored plaza for $18.85 million and is now seeking a rezoning along with height and density waivers from the city.
Why it matters
Rivertowne Square is one of two mixed-use projects Deerfield Beach’s planning and zoning board is weighing at once, The Real Deal reports, alongside a separate proposal from Boca Raton-based MBA Development Partners on a 3.8-acre city-owned parcel roughly three miles away. Both signal that Broward’s aging strip-mall corridors along South Federal Highway have become the next target for multifamily conversion, following the same wave of retail-to-residential rezonings already reshaping neighboring Miami-area suburbs. Built in 1980 and now about half occupied, Rivertowne Square is the kind of underperforming, land-locked retail asset that pencils better as housing than as a shopping center in South Florida’s current rent environment, and its outcome will help set the template for how much height and density the city is willing to trade for redeveloping blighted centers.
The numbers
The plan calls for 394 units in one tower and 342 in the other, a mix of 116 studios, 379 one-bedrooms and 241 two-bedrooms, with 106 units set aside for households earning up to 120 percent of area median income. Two parking garages would hold a combined 1,232 spaces. Retail would total 75,527 square feet, including 24,000 square feet of new ground-floor space built into the residential towers alongside the plaza’s preserved existing storefronts. JBL closed on the site for $18.85 million in 2022.
What’s next
JBL’s proposal is designed in two phases of roughly two years each, with construction on Phase 1 targeted to begin in 2027. The rezoning, plat and site plan applications still need sign-off from Deerfield Beach’s planning and zoning board before advancing to the city commission, and no start date will be firm until that approval process plays out alongside the competing MBA Development Partners application working through the same pipeline.