Planning Board backs plan to trade height for historic preservation

With its unanimous vote, the Sarasota Planning Board is all in with the city’s plan to offer a transfer of development rights program for owners of downtown historic buildings and non-contributing structures in historic districts.

The proposal is a privately initiated plan developed by the Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation with the help of planning consultant Kimley-Horn. 

On Nov. 13, the Planning Board recommended approval of an ordinance to allow owners of such properties to sell height and density rights to owners of non-historic buildings or sites within the downtown zone districts. Once sold, those rights are removed from the sending structure in perpetuity. The ordinance will next be considered by the City Commission.

The Planning Board took an extra separate step, though, to request the commission to explore developing a program to owners of single-family homes in historic residential neighborhoods surrounding the downtown. Also, in a separate vote, members asked the City Commission to consider extending the two-story transfer limit to four stories in situations that provide enough density to warrant the height. 

The rub with single-family homes, members unanimously agreed, is the trend of owners and investors buying homes in neighborhoods such as Gillespie Park, Laurel Park, Arlington Park and others, then replacing them with new single-family or even multifamily structures that are out of scale and inconsistent with the surrounding character.

Some kind of incentive for those homeowners to not sell for redevelopment — whatever development rights can be concocted for those properties — may help preserve the vintage neighborhoods. As with the commercial TDR, the rights are worth whatever a buyer is willing to pay for them.

Photo by Andrew Warfield

Back to the downtown commercial districts, the TDR creates three zones: sending zones, receiving zones and hybrid sending and receiving zones. Owners of historic and non-contributing commercial properties may opt to sell height and density permitted within their zone district to owners of properties in a receiving zone, or properties in a sending and receiving zone. 

The idea is to maintain the scale, for example, of Main Street while allowing building owners to monetize their permitted height and density without actually building it. With the accompanying deed restriction, neighbor the current or future owner of such a property may replace a building with a larger structure. Should the building be damaged or destroyed by fire or storm, it may only be replaced with one of similar size.

Sending site owners can sell all or part of their development rights, or sell them in pieces to multiple parties. Board member Shane Lamay said the program can be effective in the downtown business areas, but protection should also be considered for the neighborhoods.

“This is really well done, and it will definitely go a long way in making a better city,” Lamay said. “But the single-family neighborhoods, … they’re building lot line to lot line, and these houses are uncharacteristic of the rest of the neighborhood vernacular. This could be a tool that the city could use to fight that, but it won't work the way it's written because those lots just don't have that much to give and so they're not that valuable in terms the transferable development rights that they can offer.”

In a single-family neighborhood, a buyer could in theory acquire development rights of multiple single-family homes for use in a receiving zone project under such a program if it were exist. Lamay suggested a multiplier to magnify the value of a single-family TDR to enhance its worth to a potential development rights buyer. 

Otherwise, with a two-story limit on single-family homes in residential zone districts, the only unused development right would be the equivalent square footage of a second story where one does not currently exist.

A possible height expansion?

After the planning board unanimously approved recommending the TDR ordinance for City Commission approval, Chairman Michael Halflants motioned the commission consider permitting maximum available height transfer from two stories to four. That would create a variable height aesthetic between the 18-story wall of buildings in the Downtown Bayfront and the 10-story maximum Downtown Core height.

“I think it would be worth considering,” said Planning Director Steve Cover.

Board member Dan Clermont said the four-story limit could be a valuable tool to preserve a historic building of considerable size with enough development rights height and density to permit a transfer of that volume. And besides, he added, from the street level there isn’t any real discernible difference between a 10-story building and a 14-story building.

“I think it's a price worth paying if it's going to save a large historic site,” Clermont said. “I really believe that once a building gets to a certain height you really don't notice it as much. There's a big difference between a three- and an eight-story building, but when you're walking around and there's a 10-story and a 14-story, you don't really notice that as much. And I do like the idea of undulating heights instead of all at 10 and all at 18 (stories).”

Member Dan DeLeo said he wasn’t opposed to the idea, but it wasn’t a consideration of the Sarasota Alliance for Historic Preservation when crafting the ordinance, and that the additional two stories concept can be revisited should circumstances warrant. 

Halflants’ motion to recommend researching the idea was approved 3-2 with DeLeo and Terrill Salem opposed.