Building the ‘Urban Village’
How Beth Nielsen Turned Blight into Stylish Townhomes 
    Carol Anne Burger 

Wilton Manors and Oakland Park still hold a motherlode of opportunities to redevelop neighborhoods of dilapidated apartment buildings and run-down homes and turn them into what city planners call the “urban village.” And while it may take a village, as the saying goes, it also takes developers and real estate specialists with the vision, the courage and the financial backing to build the stylish “Key West” townhomes that young professionals and growing families want. 

Beth Nielsen had the drive and the desire to create such developments, and formed her company, Broward Townhouses Realty Group, Inc., to see them through. The “urban-village” style, Nielsen explains, was embraced by Wilton Manors because it will be a place with all the amenities (and luxuries) of new townhome construction and the convenience of city living. Access to nearby shops and services, restaurants, parks and recreation is an important part of the overall design, she said. Integral to the concept is the “retro” appeal of living in an open, ungated community, oriented to the busy, bustling street.

“The idea for this company was me,” Nielsen says. “It started out as just me. I grew up here. I went to Fort Lauderdale High School, and I wanted to make something in my home town that I could be proud of, so I had to create my own listings.” Nielsen soon found out that “once you are the guinea pig and show that something can work, others soon follow.” That’s why her company is now the exclusive sales agent for some $40 million of townhomes in the area.

Nielsen went to Harold Horne, Wilton Manors’ community services director, and asked about likely areas to begin redeveloping. “He suggested an area that the city wanted to see renewed, Highland Estates, which was a blighted neighborhood,” Nielsen says. “I started going from door to door, asking people if they wanted to sell their houses.

“When I got enough property, I started calling on developers, but they laughed at me. I had in mind to build beautiful townhomes. No one thought it could work, but I kept going until I found a builder who was willing to take a chance. The one I found had built Dockside Village, so I figured he could see the opportunity. Well, we sold the project in three months, before a shovel had even touched the ground.”

That first project was Duvall Villas, on the corner of NE Ninth Avenue and NE 28th Street. Set for completion in November, these 3-bedroom, tri-level, 3?-bath residences with 2-car garages start at $345,000. Nielsen also has a single-family home community in the works called Savannah’s Landing, on NE Sixth Avenue, which she has named after her daughter.

“Beth’s been involved in the resurrection of that area; she’s my redevelopment specialist,” Horne said. “I meet with a lot of realtors, and I generally give them the same information, but Beth took the ball and ran with it. This was less than a middle-class neighborhood. It was a high-crime area in a low-crime city. Beth brought the first private development investment to the area in 30 years.”

The public-private partnership of city cooperation and private development is the concept that works best, says Horne, who is proud of Wilton Manors’ flavor of being “a small town in a cosmopolitan area” or its descriptive tag line of being the “Island City.” And being unabashedly “gay friendly” doesn’t hurt, either. “Yes, we are the Gay-Redneck Coalition,” Horne laughed. “But it all mixes up pretty well.”