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Is mixed-use the fix?

Whether it's Smart Growth or just stacking people up, blending living and working places may solve some problems. But making a blend of commerce and homes successful tends to be site specific.

By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published January 14, 2007

Demographers estimate 8.9-million new residents will more than double the population of Central Florida by 2060. Where do you put 15.5-million people in a continuous urban area projected to sprawl from St. Pete Beach to Daytona Beach?

How about stacking them up?

The piling-on has already begun now that developers, local governments and even some high-profile antisprawl environmental groups have warmed up to one of the tools of so-called Smart Growth.

It's called mixed-used development. It's about wedging two or three times as many dwelling units into more compact sites of developable land. It's the reverse of zoning, the sprawl-inducing growth rules that regulated U.S. development since the 1930s. Mixed-use, which permits developers to load stores, offices, housing and even industrial uses into a single place, has been common in bigger cities for decades. But it's emerging as the next new national building trend because it puts more people in places closer to where they can work, live and play while making them less reliant on the automobile.

Locally, many new subdivisions in New Tampa and east Pasco County are turning to mixed-use tactics by building homes around Main Street-style town centers that combine shopping and office space. More significantly, however, Tampa Bay cities have been relaxing their zoning rules to rebuild old, established neighborhoods with mixed-use projects that house far more people than ever lived there.

Look around. New high rise condos around the Tampa Bay area feature ground floor retail space. In Largo, the city is talking about allowing Largo Mall and the former Crossroads Mall to add apartment buildings and office buildings to sprawling retail parking lots. Doubled beach hotel densities, permitting up to 125 rooms per acre, are on the table. In the Gandy area, La Entrada is the first part of 300 acres of office-industrial parks equipped with enough apartment buildings, restaurants, retailers and hotels to serve everyone who works there.

The biggest condo project in Tampa history, the 1,200 unit New Port Tampa Bay, is transforming an old marine repair yard into 52 acres laced with shopping, restaurants and a public waterfront esplanade linked to the Friendship Trail.

"We're an urban village right in the middle of the region's employment hub," said Ed Oeschlager, president of Eco Group. "If you want a gated community, we'll send you elsewhere."

It's not just big projects. Think two- and three-story offices and apartments perched above retail strip centers and 75-unit-an-acre apartment buildings wrapped around parking garages.

"Mixed-use is the new 'in' thing," said David Healey, director of the Pinellas Planning Council, which is struggling to establish uniformity in the way its member cities ladle out all the extra development rights.

Mixed-use projects cost a third more than traditional single-use construction. They take much longer to get off the ground and big ones take up to a decade to complete. They're tougher to finance because they have more moving parts. The variety of potential uses increases flexibility, but the markets for each of the elements driving a project are rarely aligned.

The housing market recently slumped. So when some condo developers put their projects on hold, local mixed-use developers looked for ways to adapt. Housing sales slowed but demand for office, hotel rooms and retail remains strong. Affordable workforce apartment demand has been hit by 50,000 units lost to condo conversions and thousands of beach hotel rooms leveled for condos. One condo-hotel proposed in downtown St. Petersburg switched more of its luxury condos to hotel rooms.

Developer Grady Pridgen's inspiration for his La Entrada, the first Pinellas project ever approved that mixes residential and industrial, came from prospective tenants for his industrial parks.

"One of the first things companies ask is where their employers will live," said Pridgen. "So our goal is to create thousands of units of workforce housing within walking distance."

His model: Addison Circle in suburban Dallas.

Environmental groups have warmed up to mixed-use as a tool to preserve more open space by clustering development, but all that extra density creates controversy.

"We support mixed-use projects that swap density for open space and stacking more people up in urban areas makes more sense than turning more raw land to subdivision sprawl or worse, five-acre ranchettes," said Eric Draper, deputy director of Florida Audubon. Problems emerge when cities use density swaps as an economic development tool or just to build a tax base

Numerous neighborhood groups have gone to the mat fighting mixed-use projects they fear threaten the status quo.

"The only thing neighborhood groups hate more than sprawl is more density," said Lee Wagman, a California architect who specializes in mixed-use projects. "So they fight hardest over traffic."

Nonetheless, developers like Pridgen get environmentally evangelistic about how the higher density posed by mixed-use projects is the best solution to the arrival of new residents, a migration nobody expects to stop.

Mass transit will never be feasible without dense population centers and common destinations.

"People complain about the extra traffic, but the fact is 140,000 people drive to and from jobs in Pinellas from Pasco, Manatee and Hillsborough counties every day," said Pridgen.

"If they lived here, they would not be commuting on the roads an hour each way. They would be polluting the air less. They would be paying taxes here and they would be shopping and living closer to where they work."

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

[Last modified January 14, 2007, 01:06:00]