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\n Bisnow\/Chloe Gallivan\n <\/p>\n
\n A picture of the rendering displayed Thursday that shows a newly designed Macy’s store\n <\/p>\n
The handful of renderings, which GFO declined to release following the event, show a redone Macy’s, glassy apartment towers with balconies, remodeled parking areas and upgraded retail.<\/p>\n
GFO\u00a0purchased the mall<\/a> at 2414 E. Sunrise Blvd. in September for $73M, along with partners InSite Group,\u00a0Prime Finance<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Sandeep Mathrani<\/a>‘s Atlas Hill Real Estate. The plans include a $100M upgrade for the mall and constructing more than 3,000 apartments, a 170-key hotel, 30 restaurants, office space and new parking.<\/p>\n The developers are utilizing the Live Local Act<\/a>, which allows projects to bypass local zoning regulations as long as 40% of the project’s units are dedicated to workforce or affordable housing.<\/p>\n But even with that leverage, the project is still facing significant pushback from locals. More than 200 residents attended a city meeting last year to oppose the project<\/a>.\u00a0A petition on Change.org<\/a>\u00a0launched\u00a0in November, just a month after the project plans went public, and has garnered 1,080 signatures.<\/p>\n The petition’s organizers, who didn’t respond to a request for comment,\u00a0said the project would\u00a0create\u00a0gridlock, strained infrastructure, shadows, noise and pollution, plus drive up costs and accelerate displacement.<\/p>\n “We cannot let the idiots, the minority \u2014 the very strong minority, but they’re very vocal \u2014 dictate what happens in a community,” Galbut said onstage\u00a0Thursday at the Hard Rock Hotel<\/a> in Hollywood.<\/p>\n \n Bisnow\/Chloe Gallivan\n <\/p>\n \n Russell Galbut speaks at Bisnow’s Broward State of the Market event Thursday, next to Hotwire Communications’ Ryan Loftus, left.\n <\/p>\n Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis told Bisnow in a phone call Thursday that the developers have reached out to\u00a0many of their neighbors, but the response hasn’t been positive.<\/p>\n “It’s not the most diplomatic way to come into a new community and try to build a project such as this,” Trantalis said\u00a0in response to Galbut’s comments.<\/p>\n “I would hope he would take that comment back,” he added. “If he calls the opponents of his projects idiots, then he called me an idiot.”<\/p>\n Because of the Live Local Act, there is little that city officials can do to block the project. Galbut said the law means the project will add affordability to Fort Lauderdale and\u00a0get through the permitting process much faster.<\/p>\n \n Bisnow\/Chloe Gallivan\n <\/p>\n \n A picture of the new renderings shown at Bisnow’s Broward State of the Market event Thursday\n <\/p>\n Galbut also praised Trantalis and the city commission for their collaboration since the project was announced.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I think for the first time, everybody’s getting the feeling that you have to work together with the development community to make great things happen, and it’s a complete change of view,” Galbut\u00a0said.<\/p>\n “The people who were the strong minority were the most vocal,” he added. “You don’t hear their voices anymore, because they’re being drowned out by intelligent, logical urban planners.”<\/p>\n Galbut, who\u00a0isn’t the first to try<\/a> to redevelop the site, said\u00a0it is much-needed. The mall hasn’t broken 70% occupancy since 2023, when it was first listed for sale<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u00a0used to be a gathering spot for residents back in the day, but like many malls over the past decade, it has been hollowed out by store closures. Redeveloping the struggling mall will bring celebrations like bar mitzvahs, weddings, quincea\u00f1eras back and turn it into a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week, live-work-play environment, Galbut said.<\/p>\n “This is hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars being added to a community to make it that central urban location, and we think that it will be immensely successful,” Galbut said.<\/p>\n “You have community leaders who independently are coming to that realization that ‘Hey, we got this one wrong. Let’s give this new developer an opportunity to show us what can happen, what we can dream of and what the art of possibility is,'”\u00a0he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The plan to redevelop\u00a0Fort Lauderdale’s largest shopping mall with\u00a0nine high-rise towers is barreling forward despite vocal protestations from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[249,251,250,1021,17473,1017],"class_list":["post-288234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-lauderdale","tag-fort-lauderdale","tag-fort-lauderdale-headlines","tag-fort-lauderdale-news","tag-galleria-mall","tag-live-local-act","tag-russell-galbut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n<\/p>\n