Joe Bonora’s vision for Fort Myers keeps getting bigger.
The apartment developer splits his time between St. Petersburg and an apartment he helped create at City Walk in Fort Myers. Now, he’s taking aspects of the bigger city and hoping to integrate them into the smaller one.
Bonora, the president of Catalyst Asset Management, unveiled the latest renderings for two of his projects, phase two of City Walk and Montage at Midtown, at the downtown Fort Myers property owner’s association meeting Thursday at the Collaboratory.
City Walk’s phase one finished with 318 units and construction should begin on phase two by the beginning of next year. There will be five townhomes built on the vacant land at the corner of Virginia Avenue and McGregor Boulevard with each townhome about 3,000 square feet with its own pool. The high-end luxury homes will be priced at $1.5 million to $2 million.
The vacant land at the corner of Altamonte Avenue and McGregor will become 60 more apartment units with about 16,000 square feet of retail on the first floor. Bonora decided against putting a restaurant there because he didn’t want to generate any extra traffic or the logistics that come with having a restaurant.
“The City Walk project really turned me on to suburban, infill development,” Bonora said. “It’s amazing how many people who live there tell me they don’t have to use their car once.” That’s why Bonora is hoping the former The News-Press building at 2442 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., currently owned by the city of Fort Myers, can someday include a grocery store, like a Sprouts or a Whole Foods Market. It would support the new residents of his 321-unit Montage at Midtown apartment complex.
Ground should break on Montage by the end of this year, he said. “This is an area that I can’t say it’s being underutilized,” he said. “It’s just not being utilized at all. The whole area is at the beginning stages of what’s going to be a complete transformation.”
Bonora envisions partnering with nationally-known mural and streetscape artists to make Montage a hip and trendy place to live. In addition, he wants to create an electric vehicle ridesharing program to cut back on traffic. And he wants to create on-site business partnerships with locally-managed companies like Shift Coffee bar and D-1 training, a fitness center co-owned by local NFL players Sammy and Jaylen Watkins and Tre Boston.
“If we get more people into car sharing, it brings the cost of development down,” Bonora said, which brings the cost of living down for the renters who choose to live there. “We’re trying to figure out how to get creative with transformation.”
