News - A new Boca Raton village seeks approval for nearly 800 residences, a hotel, shops, restaurants, and more.

A massive Boca Raton village would offer many new residences, a hotel, offices, shops, restaurants and more on a swath of land directly east of I-95. University Village, a transit-oriented development, proposes 781 residential units, a 185-room hotel, 150,000 square feet of retail and more than 68,000 square feet of office space wedged between Spanish River Boulevard and Yamato Road. “You can live, and you can work, and you can stay there. And you got shops, and you got restaurants,” said Rick Coffin, the senior vice president of development for Penn-Florida Companies, which is representing the project. “I always say it’s like Mizner (Park) on steroids, so to speak,” he said. Coffin said shuttles would take people to and from spots within the community as well as to locations outside of it, such as the Tri-Rail station and Florida Atlantic University, which is directly south of the project. University Village is not affiliated with FAU. However, one of the goals of the project is to retain some of FAU’s graduates by offering jobs and places to live. “We were looking for a way that the kids could come back and live here, and live in a more higher-end type of community, so to speak, where they’re used to walking to wherever they want to go, to restaurants and the services,” Coffin said. “That was one of the thought processes behind University Village: How do we get the kids to come back home?” The site currently sits undeveloped, holding about 77 acres of Florida scrub. Directly to the west of the property is the walking and biking thoroughfare, El Rio Trail. “It’s the last great piece of property in Boca,” Coffin said. During a community appearance board meeting on Nov. 18, Bonnie Miskel, a land-use attorney representing the project, said the project “really is a village,” intending “to provide most of the necessary products and services that you would want to see with the office, the retail.” The project, which is near the Tri-Rail station, also “includes a transit center, to encourage transit and the connections to other parts of the city,” Miskel said. The University Village master plan originally was approved in 2015 and submitted for additional approvals in 2019, but COVID-19-related supply-chain disruptions, cost increases and governmental administrative extensions spurred delays, according to a Penn-Florida spokesperson. The original proposal would have brought an even larger project with 829 dwelling units, 170,000 square feet of retail, 72,000 square feet of office and a hotel. The goal is not to build out the property to its maximum approved density, Miskel said. At the Nov. 18 meeting, residents asked questions and expressed concerns about traffic and how the natural environment could be affected. Coffin said the scrubland would not be kept because there is not a lot of value in that kind of environment; rather, the landscaping of University Village will have a lot of trees throughout the community. And when it comes to traffic, Coffin said the goal is to use car alternatives through shuttles, buses and more. Other mixed-use projects also are underway in Boca Raton. Just west of the proposed University Village project is Link at Boca, another transit-oriented development rising at 680 W. Yamato Road, which holds the Tri-Rail station’s parking lot and the currently vacant land next to it. Link at Boca is planned to have shops, restaurants and 340 new residences, some of which would be allotted to workforce housing. Then, there is the Boca Raton Innovation Campus, which also is next to where Link at Boca and the University Village projects could be. BRIC’s 1.7 million-square-foot office park recently added more tenants, moving closer to completing the $100 million capital improvement program of the former IBM site. If University Village receives the required approvals from the city, construction could start as early as next year.