In 2018, downtown Fort Lauderdale added just over 1,000 residential units. An additional 3,000 units have already come to market so far in 2019, with more underway. While speakers at ULI Southeast Florida’s “Fort Lauderdale Emerges” event acknowledged the risk of overbuilding, they were also confident that a blockbuster mixed-use project will attract interest for decades to come.

The Main Las Olas, a 1.5 million-square-foot (139,000 sq m) residential, retail, and office complex, was driven by Terry Stiles, the founder of Stiles Corporation, who drove the project forward while battling cancer. Though the site was purchased in 2006, the development process did not begin until 2016. A year later, Stiles passed away. Still, Robert Breslau, Stiles’s chief development officer, credits Terry Stiles’s unwavering pursuit of the project as a key factor in its development.

“Terry was convinced that this was the right property and the last full block available for development in Fort Lauderdale,” he said at a panel discussion that included Stiles Corporation president Scott MacLaren; Mark Portner, a director at project partner Shorenstein; and moderator Eric Rapkin, who leads the real estate practice group at Akerman.

The Main Las Olas is being prepared for occupancy by 2020. But the road to getting the project approved was long and involved navigation of an economic crisis and incorporation of both a public/private partnership and nontraditional financing to bring it to life.

“This project goes back some time because [Stiles] wanted to secure a Las Olas tower, and for years there was nothing happening west of Third Avenue,” said MacLaren. Though the site was purchased in 2006, building plans were neither approved that year, nor three years later, when the Great Recession struck—a fact that Breslau now recognizes as a blessing.

Finally, in 2016, it appeared that the project would have a chance to become the immense mixed-use enclave envisioned by Stiles. At that time, Broward College, which owned and operated the land adjacent to the Stiles plot, announced an interest in a possible public/private partnership (PPP) that would help fund an endowment for the college.