If you park at one of the two surface lots at 1301 South Ocean Drive, walk your kids to a class inside the Hollywood Beach Culture and Community Center, or cut across Harry Berry Park to reach the sand, you're standing on land that a developer now holds under a 99-year lease. The building comes down. The park gets rebuilt. A 29-story tower goes up next to it. None of that is new information if you've been following local coverage since 2020.

What most residents still don't have straight is why the project got bigger this year instead of smaller, and it wasn't neighborhood pressure or a developer negotiating up. It was a state law written for affordable housing.

What's Actually Sitting on That Site Right Now

The parcel is about three and a half acres: the aging community center building, Harry Berry Park, and the two asphalt lots most beachgoers use for quick access to the sand. The city has been trying to redevelop it since Related Group submitted an unsolicited proposal back in 2020, and the project has worn at least three names since then: Hollywood Arts Residences, then Portofino Hollywood, and around City Hall, simply "the 1301 Project."

The plan calls for the current community center to be torn down and replaced, with the city responsible for building its successor, and Harry Berry Park rebuilt and expanded with funding the developer has committed to as part of the deal. In exchange, Related gets a long-term ground lease to build condos and rental units on the rest of the parcel.

The Law That Made the Project Bigger, Not Smaller

Here's the part that got buried under the height and unit-count headlines. In April, the story circulating was that Portofino had shrunk: down from an earlier 190-unit, 30-story pitch to a more modest 111 units and 27 stories. That framing held for about a month.

On May 20, 2026, the Hollywood City Commission voted 5 to 2 to fold the project into Florida's Live Local Act, a state statute that lets developers bypass local height and density rules if a set share of units go to workforce housing. The city's own resolution refers to these as "Hero Housing" rental units, aimed at teachers, nurses, police officers, and similar workers.

The tradeoff most residents didn't see coming: incorporating that affordable-housing law didn't shrink the tower. Within days, updated site plans circulating in local coverage showed a project larger than the version that had just been publicly described as scaled down.

The current plan is one floor shorter than the original 2022 pitch, but it has more total units than either prior version, because the workforce-housing carve-out under Live Local came bundled with additional market-rate condos rather than replacing them.

Six Years to Get Here

For residents trying to place today's news in context, the short version of the timeline looks like this:

• 2020: Related submits an unsolicited proposal for the site; the city runs a competitive process and ranks Related's offer first by March 2021.
• 2022: The city commission approves a comprehensive agreement and 99-year ground lease, with an original design near 190 units and 30 stories.
• 2020 through early 2026: Zoning objections and resident opposition stall the project for roughly five years, with the site's "community" land-use designation cited as a barrier to high-rise housing.
• April 2026: A revised, smaller design (111 units, 27 stories) surfaces publicly, with a developer's attorney telling reporters groundbreaking was targeted for late 2026.
• May 20, 2026: The commission votes 5-2 to bring the project under the Live Local Act and amends the agreement to add Hero Housing rental units.
• May 25, 2026: Follow-up reporting puts the reconfigured project at 210 units and 29 stories, with 84 units designated as workforce rentals.
• Late July 2026: Reporting on the development team's outreach to residents places the next groundbreaking estimate at late 2027, a year later than the spring projection.

That last shift matters more to daily life at the beach than any renderings do. Nothing about parking, park access, or the community center building changes on a calendar that's now sliding by a full year.

What Residents Actually Get in Return

There are two public-facing pieces to the deal, and they're funded differently. The city is responsible for building the new community center, a three-story structure estimated at 20 million dollars and designed by the architecture firm SOM, with ocean views, a café and restaurant space, and room for events. The current center closes at some point during construction, and the replacement doesn't open until that funding, tied to the lease, materializes.

The second piece is Harry Berry Park itself, which the developer has committed to funding as part of the agreement, expanding its green space by roughly 70 percent over what's there today. For a stretch of barrier island where open, un-programmed park land is limited, that's a real change in what's available to walk a dog, let kids run, or just sit without paying for a chair.

On the financial side, the deal projects the city netting about 62.5 million dollars in the tower's first year from condo sales and related income, and roughly 2.72 billion dollars over the full 99-year lease term, according to figures city staff presented in May.

The Meeting That Already Happened, and the One Still Coming

Related's development team held a public session on August 6, 2026 at the Garfield Community Center on Connecticut Street, framed as an effort to answer resident questions and correct what the team characterized as misinformation about the project. If you missed it, you weren't alone. Opposition to Portofino has run for years, and the tone in commission chambers reflects it.

"It's not your property to give it away."

That's Hollywood resident Mark Ross, speaking at the May 20 commission meeting before the vote. Mayor Josh Levy, on the other side of the same discussion, pointed to the revenue projections: "It's eye-opening to see all the financial benefits."

Neither side has the final word yet. Design details for the tower, the community center, and the park are still being worked out according to the most recent reporting, which is part of why the development team is holding sessions like the one on August 6 rather than treating the May vote as the last word. The city's official project page is the most direct way to track what comes next, including any future community input sessions.

What This Means for Your Weekend This Year

If you use the park, the parking lots, or the community center on any kind of regular basis, the honest answer is: not much changes in the near term. Groundbreaking is now pegged to late 2027, not this year or even the tail end of 2026. The lots, the building, and the park will likely function as they do today through most of next year, even as the paperwork behind them keeps moving.

What's worth watching is whatever comes next in the commission process, since that's the point where design details for the new community center and the reshaped park get locked in. If there's a version of this project you'd rather see, that stage, not the groundbreaking, is where your input still has somewhere to go.

For more on how Hollywood's coastline and downtown corridor are shifting this year, our neighborhood guide to Hollywood tracks both the beach and the Harrison Street district, and our recent look at what's happening on Harrison Street covers the other side of town going through its own changes this year.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property near the beach, or just want a second set of eyes on how Hollywood's coastline is evolving, Mariana Boccia is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.