West Palm’s plan to allow bigger buildings resisted
Residents say bigger, taller buildings would affect quality of life.
WEST PALM BEACH — A city plan to let developers build bigger if they add features with a public benefit received a wary reception from residents at a West Palm Beach City Hall presentation last week.
Many said bigger, taller buildings would bring traffic to local streets, cast homes in shadow and undo hard-fought gains to the quality of life in historic neighborhoods. Others pointed to businesses on South Dixie Highway that had been renovated or redeveloped without need for incentives.
“With full employment, we should not be offering incentives to fat cat developers,” one resident told Development Services Director Rick Greene, who made the presentation Monday to seek public input. “Is this, ‘No Developer Left Behind?’ ”
Greene said the plan would allow property owners to add a limited amount of additional density to projects than what is currently allowed, if they add affordable or workforce housing, public parking spaces, or such cultural amenities as “civic or community centers, theaters/cinemas, libraries, zoological or botanical gardens, historical landmarks, museums and similar facilities.”
Similarly, they would be allowed to bulk-up their projects if they added “transportation enhancements,” such as funding trolley service expansions, adding bicycle share stations or car-share stations or enhance intersections, which fits with the city’s current push to encourage alternative forms of transit and mass transit.
The density would be capped under a formula using floor-area ratio, the relationship between the usable floor area that a build- ing would have and the total area of its lot.
There are about 100 properties in the city zoned “General Commercial” that would be eligible for the incentives, some of them on North and South Dixie Highway, some on Okeechobee Boulevard, Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and elsewhere.
The city controls density but has not limited how high a devel-