Find a way to say yes

Kudos to Travis Vengroff, 28-year-old son of Sarasota entrepreneur Harvey Vengroff. Like father, like son: Direct, to the point, unafraid to tell it like it is.

Earlier in the week, the younger Vengroff told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

“If we can’t make Sarasota better, we will make Manatee better. If Sarasota is going to go out of its way to make it difficult for us, just up the road in Manatee is a place where we can be successful and help people who are still in our backyard … It is just too much hassle working with Sarasota.”

The Vengroffs have a successful business model for turning old hotels into apartments where rents run around $650 a month — a price level that is in acute short supply in northern Sarasota city and county.

They have implemented this model on one former hotel on North Tamiami Trail and wanted to do more. The Vengroffs also have been negotiating with the city for about a year for approvals to develop a 400-unit apartment complex just north of Fruitville near Audubon Place.

But in each instance, the Vengroffs have encountered city officials who say the Vengroffs must go through the city’s comprehensive plan and zoning process.

We get it: City officials say they cannot make exceptions; their jobs require them to comply with and enact the city’s codes and laws uniformly.

But this is where leadership comes in — at City Manager Tom Barwin’s level and at the City Commission level.

It seems pretty simple:

• The city badly needs affordable apartments.
• A developer wants to supply them.
• But the developer says there are  unnecessary government regulations that, if required, would eliminate the ability to keep the apartments affordable.

To wit: Three months ago, in response to a city official’s question about his building workforce housing, Vengroff provided a partial list of the superfluous regulations the city would require. 

As you read Vengroff’s list below, think not just of the tedious requirements, think also of what each of these regulations costs; how that cost affects the ultimate price of rental rates; and how these regulations are multiplied each time someone proposes to build or develop in the city of Sarasota. No wonder the cost of housing is so high. No wonder there is a shortage of workforce housing.

Wrote the senior Vengroff:

“We have a city government that can only study the problem but not solve it.

“We have families living in these old motels in unsafe conditions and paying twice what they can afford for weekly rentals.

“We need a new housing classification that will allow investors to purchase these old hotels and use them as efficiency apartments.

• “We don’t need an arborist report or a landscape plan.
• “We don’t need a department of education study.
• “We don’t need a traffic study;
• “We don’t need a parking study;
• “We don’t need to study the elevations of refuse containers.
• “We don’t need to supply a route for garbage trucks that have been picking up at the same location for 50 years.
• “We don’t need a hurricane evacuation plan.
• “We don’t need a plan to hook up to city water. It was done years ago.
• “We don’t need a plan to hook up to city sewer. It was done years ago.
• “We don’t need a plan for utilities: electric, telephone, gas and cable. They are all working for years.
• “We don’t need neighborhood meetings for police department, fire department and transportation department.
• “We don’t need to wait for tree protection comments from the city arborist.”

It would be easy to dismiss Vengroff’s objections as just another greedy developer complaining about regulations. But Vengroff is one of the few entrepreneurs in Sarasota who has devoted much of his business to providing livable, safe workforce housing.

In return, you might think that would sway city commissioners, especially, to step up and help him.

To that end, they could start with answering this question:

What is the problem to be solved?

And then address it. And address it by adopting a mindset that is diametrically opposite that of what exists in most bureaucracies. Instead of an instinctive no, try first to find a way to say yes to a customer’s request.

If city commissioners and City Manager Barwin believed wholeheartedly that expanding workforce housing in the city of Sarasota is a priority, they would find a way to make it happen. It’s difficult to think how they don’t see that it is.

FRUITVILLE MEANT TO BE FOUR LANES

It must be part of their DNA. Urban planners seem to be driven in life to achieve two goals: to slow automobile traffic to 25 mph and make the world completely “pedestrian friendly.”

Maybe that’s a little extreme and hyperbolic. But those objectives certainly have permeated the planning department for the past 20 years at Sarasota City Hall.

Indeed, over the past few months, as the city’s Design Studio nears the completion of its new form-based code, city officials have led workshops on creating a more pedestrian friendly intersection at Siesta Drive and Higel Avenue on Siesta Key; reconfiguring John Ringling Parkway heading into St. Armands Circle with angled parking and much lower speed limits; and redesigning Fruitville Road near downtown so it is more accommodating for pedestrians.

Nice ideas, but at what price?

In the case of the latter, Fruitville Road, the city apparently has two goals that may be incompatible: increasing pedestrian comfort while at the same time avoiding a decline in the existing level of service for motorists.

To be sure, most everyone would like the looks of Fruitville Road to improve, especially from Robarts Arena all the way to U.S. 41. Fruitville is one of the main gateways into downtown Sarasota, and just as we all learned the importance of trying to make a good first impression, most cities like to do the same for their visitors. So you can envision an attractively landscaped Fruitville Road from U.S. 301 to U.S. 41, a pleasant parkway that makes a statement about the charm and character of Sarasota.

But at what price, what tradeoffs?

When Sarasota city commissioners devised their downtown plans in the 1960s, they envisioned and created  Fruitville Road, Tamiami Trail along the bayfront, Mound Street and U.S. 301 as perimeter thoroughfares around downtown, able to move large amounts of traffic quickly.

Then-City Commissioner Gil Waters to this day has pursued the unfinished piece to this plan — closing off Main Street from Gulf Stream to Orange Avenue to automobiles and creating a European-like pedestrian plaza.

Altogether, it makes sense; a vibrant, walkable downtown core, rimmed by four roads that allow motorists to skirt the center of the city. And that’s the way Fruitville Road has worked for the past 50 years. It is the primary road for motorists going from Interstate 75 to Longboat, Lido, St. Armands and Bird keys and vice versa. Can you imagine the bottlenecks and backups if Fruitville were redesigned from four lanes to two?

City planners are expected to conduct more workshops on the future design of Fruitville and then submit plans to the City Commission early next year. We would urge commissioners not to get sucked into the urban-planner vortex of walkability at the expense of moving traffic. 

We would urge commissioners to keep in mind that as the area north of Fruitville Road and downtown — mostly the Rosemary District — are redeveloped, that neighborhood will develop its own retail core and pedestrian friendly amenities. 

What’s more, we would point commissioners to Boston. Specifically to the intersection of Boylston Street and Massachusetts Avenue. At that location are two of Boston’s busiest streets. Cars drive 35 mph, and delivery trucks and cabbies change lanes like urban maniacs. At the same time, that intersection is teeming with pedestrians and bicyclists — students from the Berklee College of Music and Northeastern University. Fenway Park is a short walk. 

Talk about a dangerous intersection — Mass Ave. and Boylston. But it works. Automobile traffic keeps moving, and students and pedestrians safely cross streets from sidewalk to sidewalk.

Be wary of the urban-planners’ urge to want to force every car to drive 25 mph, and to turn Fruitville into a two-lane bottleneck.