Big real estate developments have been rare in little Wilton Manors, the low-rise suburban city sandwiched between Oakland Park and Fort Lauderdale. Major rental apartment developments have transformed the Flagler Village area of Fort Lauderdale, just south of Wilton Manors, but not Wilton Manors itself. Now, however, a seasoned developer is planning to build a six-story, mixed-use building with 190 rental apartments in the overlooked suburb.
“There is a quaintness [in Wilton Manors], a boutique-y feel, a very inviting environment,” said Morris Kaplan, president of Kaplan Residential, who is leading his company’s development of Generation at Wilton Manors, designed as a 190-unit apartment building with about 9,000 square feet of commercial space, including a café, a retail store and office space. The plan for the 3.6-acre development site also includes a new public plaza and dog park. “It can’t be just a traditional six-story building,” Kaplan said. “There is an authenticity and uniqueness to this little location that we really wanted to capture.”
Much of the charm of Wilton Manors stems from the city’s embrace of a large LGBT community within its total population of about 11,500 residents. “Maintaining our inclusive and welcoming culture is a key core value of Wilton Manors. We continue to score a perfect 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Municipal Equality Index for the tenth year in a row,” Mayor Scott Newton wrote in the fall 2024 edition of the city government’s quarterly newsletter. “Working with the Police Chief, we also created the Safe Place Program, which provides safe haven for residents and visitors who have been victims of hate, bias, and harassment to report crimes if they don’t feel comfortable coming forward to the police department.”
Wilton Manors is also a relatively affluent enclave of Greater Fort Lauderdale. Census data show the median annual household income in Wilton Manors is $81,424. The comparable Broward County amount is $74,531 yearly, about 14 percent less. Kaplan said he expects the apartment market in Wilton Manors to support monthly rents above $3 per square foot at the residential building his company plans to build. He said the average size of the Generation at Wilton Manors apartments will be 1,000 square feet – which translates to an average monthly rent of $3,000.
Generation at Wilton Manors has already been years in the making. In 2022 and 2023, Kaplan spent $12.2 million to acquire and assemble the development site, a cluster of five Wilton Manors properties totaling 3.6 acres, at 1209 and 1225 NE 24th St., 2449 and 2430 NE 13th Ave., and 1401 NE 24th St. The site is occupied by a single-family home and several commercial structures used by businesses such as Lola’s Market and The Alchemist Café, all of which will be demolished to make way for Generation at Wilton Manors.
“Some of the buildings there, where Alchemist is, and the sidewalks and everything else – they’re kind of antiquated. They’ve been there for a while,” Kaplan said in a Sept. 25 interview with Fort Lauderdale Magazine. “But what we did, when we worked with the city, we said we would try to create that same community feeling.”
That commitment extends to replicating and relocating a wall mural that memorializes the students and staff members who tragically lost their lives in the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Kaplan said he was unaware of the mural, tucked behind Lola’s Market at 2449 NE 13th Ave., when he started to negotiate an acquisition of the property where it’s located. “Unfortunately, the wall itself is in a parking deck,” he said. “We can’t maintain that. But we’re going to keep that memorial in some fashion. For us, it is really part of the community.”
Generation at Wilton Manors is Kaplan Residential’s first major South Florida development. Other Kaplan developments in Florida include Generation Venice and Generation Englewood on the state’s Gulf Coast. Founded in New Jersey in 1952, Kaplan Residential moved its headquarters to Bay Harbor Islands in 2004 and, so far, has mostly developed in Georgia and the Carolinas. Kaplan Residential is developing near, not in, Fort Lauderdale for a strategic reason. “In the markets that we’ve built in, we try to stay away from the mainstream because you’ve got all the big builders there,” Kaplan said.
Back in January, Kaplan Residential won key city approvals of proposals to rezone Generation at Wilton Manors’ development site, on the northeast corner of the intersection of NE 24th Street and the Florida East Coast railroad. The Wilton Manors City Commission also agreed in January to vacate 1,000 square feet of public right of way on NE 24th Street and allow Kaplan Residential to incorporate it as part of the development site.
But as summer turned to fall and the Federal Reserve cut interest rates, Kaplan Residential was still seeking an affordable lender to finance its six-story Wilton Manors development while soliciting construction contractors for updated estimates of the cost to build it. “We’re talking to some contractors, trying to get some updates on pricing, because we’ve heard that pricing may have softened up,” Kaplan said. “And so, to move this forward, we’ve gone out to try to reprice this again and see where costs come in. And we anticipate some more interest rate drops.”
Kaplan said he expects his company to land an affordably priced construction loan for its Wilton Manors development by winter or spring in 2025, then start construction before the end of 2025. The Kaplan Residential president said lower borrowing and building costs, together with reduced political uncertainty, will eventually push the development forward. “With those changes and the election behind us in November,” he said, “things will start to improve.”
