250 apartments near Juno get OK
County Commission advances plan despite widespread opposition.
Despite a flood of opposition from residents, Palm Beach County commissioners Wednesday advanced a developer’s plan to build 250 apartments and townhouses in a failing shopping plaza on U.S. 1, just outside the Juno Beach town limits.
Fairway Investments submitted the plan with a promise to include 63 workforce housing units as a condition of approval for the proposed Lenox North Beach community. If approved, Lenox North Beach will be a gated community on 11 acres a half-mile north of PGA Boulevard.
The County Commission voted 5-2, with Hal Valeche and Mary Lou Berger dissenting, to submit the developer’s request to increase the number of townhouses and apartments allowed per acre to the state for review.
After the state reviews the change, it will come back to commissioners for final approval this summer. Commissioners also will hear a request for rezoning and review the site plan at that time.
Lenox North Beach is in Valeche’s district. He said he’s rarely seen a project with such universal opposition. He hasn’t found any resident in a 10-mile radius who supports it, he said.
“It doesn’t belong here. It belongs in a much more urban setting,” he said, noting that single-family homes surround the site. “This sticks out like a sore thumb to me.”
The developer reduced the number of apartments and townhouses from 300 to 250 in response to feedback from neighbors. Current standards allow 211 units.
Berger said she opposes the project because of the height — a three-story building surrounding a parking garage.
“That’s too high,” she said, explaining that she lives in a onestory house and wouldn’t want people in a new development peering down on her.
Amid neighbors’ objections, the developer changed the original plans to limit housing around
the perimeter to two stories. Fairway Investments also replaced parking lots with a parking garage, added parks and said it would replace buffer walls, planner Ken Tuma said.
Palm Beach County Mayor Melissa McKinlay said the county is going to have to consider repurposing strip malls, big-box stores and banks to address an extreme shortage of workforce housing.
“We’re going to have a lot of neighborhoods who are going to feel the pain of this creativity,” she said.
Workforce housing is priced so that people such as police officers, firefighters, teachers and home health care aides can afford it.
Rents for such housing in Lenox North Beach will range from $810 for a one-bedroom apartment to $2,600 for a three-bedroom apartment or townhouse, depending on the person’s income level, Tuma said.
Residents of the nearby Pleasant Ridge, Captains Key and Juno Terrace communities packed the commission meeting Wednesday to oppose the project’s advancement. As working homeowners and retirees, they said they had no qualms about the workforce housing component.
Instead, they spoke for more than two hours against the project’s density and traffic. TJ Nichols, who lives behind the North Beach Plaza, said the development will put more cars on U.S. 1 and Ellison Wilson Road and the two-lane Juno Road. Her neighborhood will become a cut-through, she said.
The 102,670-square-foot shopping plaza, if it had more tenants and a fast-food restaurant, would generate 4,798 trips, Tuma said. Lenox North Beach would generate 1,663.
Because Juno Beach is a barrier island, evacuation is usually mandatory in case of a hurricane. An increase in density could result in a loss of life, Juno Beach Vice Mayor Jim Lyons said.
The Juno Beach Town Council opposes the project, and four of the five council members spoke against it. Juno Beach officials get to register their support or objections because the property is in an area the town could annex in the future.
The shopping plaza, on the west side of U.S. 1, includes a women’s clothing store, nail salon, pizza shop, tobacco shop and liquor store.
Fairway Investments bought the plaza for $14.2 million in September 2004s. Changing the rules for Fairway Investments could set a precedent for other struggling shopping centers, residents cautioned.
“We are not here to rescue people from bad financial investments,” Captains Landing resident Joseph O’Neill said.