An aging Holiday Inn near the old IBM campus in Boca Raton is on its way to becoming an apartment complex, featuring 20 residences priced for the region’s workforce.
The City Council voted on May 15 to approve Boca HI Suites LLC’s plans for the 5-acre site along Northwest 53rd Street, off Yamato Road west of Interstate 95, that also call for a restaurant and three retail spaces.
The hotel’s 183 rooms would become 125 apartments, 13 of them designated as “affordable” and seven as “workforce.”
The city argued the project would add rental housing in an area already surrounded by offices and close to the Tri-Rail station. It also would feature an 8-foot path linking the property to the El Rio Trail, which links the city’s northern neighborhoods to Glades Road and Florida Atlantic University.
Neither the city nor Boca HI Suites has said when work would begin on the project would begin or when people can apply for housing.
Boca complex will have apartments priced for city’s workforce
The building is now the eighth project approved by the council under Boca’s Commercial Industrial Multifamily Development designation, which requires 10% affordable housing and 5% workforce housing.
Affordable housing applies to people making up to 80% of the area’s average median income. Workforce housing usually applies to people — many of them teachers, nurses and public-safety workers — making 80% to 120% of the median income.
The seven projects covered by the designation have brought about 2,200 new apartments to Boca Raton since the city created the designation in 2024.
The vote to approve the plan was 4-1, with council member Jon Pearlman voting against it.
During the council’s discussion, Pearlman asked the city staff how the seven developments that have received the designation would be different if their developers had sought approval under the state’s Live Local Act.
That law gives developers tax incentives and lets them override some local land-use laws if they agree to price at least 40% of the housing at affordable rates for at least 30 years.
“Had these seven projects, these 2200 units, if these units had been Live local projects, is it accurate to say that we would have roughly 8,800 affordable housing units right now instead of 2000? Well, I’m sorry. It’s a percentage of that,” Pearlman said. “But it’s accurate to say that we would have four times the amount of affordable housing across these seven projects right now had they been Live Local projects — is that correct?”
Brandon Schaad, the city’s director of development services, told Pearlman: “If the same projects had been under Live Local, yes.”
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Boca Holiday Inn to become apartments, affordable housing, after vote
Reporting by Duvasana Bisoondial, Special to The Post / Palm Beach Post
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