Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Grocer gussies up store plan

Publix hopes its idea for a beach market gets a warmer reception than other mixed-use projects in the Tampa Bay area.

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published October 4, 2006

ST. PETE BEACH - A Tampa developer has unveiled plans to spend more than $100-million replacing 38-year-old Dolphin Village Shopping Center with a seven-floor condo and a new Publix supermarket sandwiched between two floors of a parking garage.

Shoppers would wheel their carts out via hospital-sized elevators. An existing Publix, which would be replaced and expanded by about a third, would be hidden in the back of a center fronted by a tin-roofed, two-story retail center facing Gulf Boulevard. One anchor would be an unnamed "landmark" restaurant with a balcony view of the gulf beach across the street.

The project is one of a dozen "untraditional" stores the Lakeland grocer either opened or has in the works as a solution to Florida's soaring land costs and fast-growing number of cramped urban spaces.

The chain, which opened a few of the hybrid stores already in upscale neighborhoods in Miami Beach, Coral Gables and Atlanta, has put itself at the cutting edge of the development trend du jour: mixed-use projects that blend retailing, offices and residential uses on the same piece of property.

"These projects get us closer to customers in neighborhoods we otherwise would have trouble serving because of land costs or constrained sites," said Shannon Patten, spokeswoman for Publix.

Publix built its first one in Miami Beach almost a decade ago when confronted with wedging a 1-acre store into a 1-acre lot. The solution: build the store over a parking garage and ferry shoppers in and out on an escalator with a separate lane for carts.

RMC Properties Group, which is the joint venture partner in the St. Pete Beach project, is developing two others for Publix. One is a ground-floor Publix in a 10-story waterfront condo in Sarasota that opens by the end of this year. RMC recently started construction of another that will be part of a 16-story condo overlooking Lake Eola in downtown Orlando.

Many condo residents love being a stone's throw from a drugstore and supermarket. Some in Miami even consider a Whole Foods Market in one condo a prized amenity.

Similar mixed-use projects, born of the recent condo boom and local government planners' yen for ground-floor retail space in them, have received a chilly reception in the Tampa Bay area. Voters in Indian Rocks Beach turned down a condo-grocery there last spring. A deal for a Sweetbay Supermarket planned as part of a high-rise Channelside condo in Tampa collapsed. The Tampa City Council recently asked that a proposed Hyde Park Publix on 1.5 acres at Platt Street and Armenia Avenue be built with the supermarket underneath the parking garage rather than on top.

"There has been widespread acceptance of these projects in other densely populated cities, but in the Tampa Bay area, people are still getting used to them," said Michael Leeds, a partner in RMC.

Indeed, the St. Pete Beach project is caught in the crossfire of a larger pitched political battle between the area's pro- and anti-development forces. Opponents object to high-rise buildings, pricey condos and mixed-use building density they compare to cramming 10 pounds of development into a 5-pound bag.

Voters will decide Nov. 7 on an assortment of development issues facing the beach city. Issue No. 6 on the ballot subjects the city's most recent mixed-use rules to a citywide vote.

If voters toss them out, RMC's plans will be left in limbo.

"We have a Plan B and Plan C," said Leeds. "But we think this is the best set of tradeoffs to rebuild what is a very dated Dolphin Village, enhance the city and provide a first-class new supermarket."

RMC, which has about 2-million square feet of projects in the pipeline, and Equity One, a North Miami Beach real estate investment trust that owns about a dozen shopping centers locally, paid $28-million for the 12-acre Dolphin Village in January.

Developers hope to recoup the land cost by selling 175 residential units tentatively priced at the low end of the luxury beach condo market. The condos will be isolated at the north end of the project.

Dolphin Village was built in 1968 on a sand spur-pocked field that served as the first preseason training camp for the Miami Dolphins in the mid 1960s.

Designing mixed-use projects is complex. The latest technique is to separate residents and their parking garage from the noises, smells and crowds drawn to nearby stores.

RMC changed its plans eight times before making them public, most recently in a series of workshops with center tenants and local residents.

RMC moved Publix loading docks out of sight into an enclosed space. Deliveries will be limited to daytime hours and trash bins emptied and hosed down frequently to contain odor. Condo residents have their own secured entrance to the shopping center. RMC intends to heavily landscape the upper deck of the three-level garage for on-site drainage retention, including a small park with a beach view for shoppers who buy their lunch at the Publix deli.

The shade of a parking garage can be a welcome respite for shoppers on hot summer days. But Publix also learned it sometimes must color code the garage to keep customers from getting lost.

Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or 727 893-8252.

[Last modified October 3, 2006, 23:27:43]