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Boynton Beach breaks ground on Ocean Breeze West
Boynton Beach Mayor Jose A. Rodriguez addresses the gathering Friday during the ground-breaking for Ocean Breeze West.
By David Sedore, Palm Beach Business.com
BOYNTON BEACH — Habitat for Humanity and the Boynton Beach Faith Based Community Development Corp. are collaborating with the city to build 21 homes on the old site of Boynton Terrace.
Representatives of city, the two nonprofit organizations and other partners involved in the project broke ground on the project, called Ocean Breeze West, Friday afternoon. The project sits in the 800 block of N. Seacrest Blvd.
“We’re off to a great start,” Boynton Mayor Jose Rodriguez said. “It’s a great day in Boynton Beach.”
Construction on the first homes is expected to begin in early March; the final home will be completed in 2014. Projected construction cost: $2.1 million, Habitat Executive Director Mike Campbell said. Habitat will build 11 of the units; Faith Based Community Development Corp. will build 10.
It is the first multi-home project undertaken by Habitat for Humanity of South Palm Beach County. The organization already has 28 prospective homeowners in the “pipeline,” which includes helping to build other habitat homes — and eventually their own.
The old Boynton Terrace, built in the 1980s, had deteriorated into a crime-infested, rat-invested eyesore. “I’ll be kind and that there were some challenges with that property,” Rodriguez said. “But we were blessed with some hurricanes that came through here in 2004.”
That was a reference to hurricanes Frances and Jeanne, which hit the area in the fall of 2004 and battered Boynton Terrace. The city demolished the apartments in 2005, and the site has sat vacant since. The Boynton Beach Community Development Agency bought the site in 2007 at a cost of $7.5 million.
Rodriguez called the project a key in the redevelopment of an area along the Seacrest Blvd. corridor known as the Heart of Boynton.
Others involved in the project include the federal government, which provided a $400,000 grant through the neighborhood stabilization program, Wells Fargo Bank and Florida Power & Light.
Habitat’s Campbell said the organization has $1 million set aside for the project, and will be raising the remainder as it goes along. Habitat typically reinvests money it receives from the mortgage payments of its homeowners into new projects. Habitat also will be “aggressively” seeking out local, state and federal housing grants.
