Commission Okays Skinny Lots
Commission Okays Skinny Lots
Ignores Staff Recommendation
A snug row of four large homes soon will occupy what is now a vacant, tree-shaded lot on Pennsylvania Avenue. Lot frontages will average 60 feet, instead of the 75- to 85-foot minimum called for in city laws.
A majority of city commissioners at the September 28 meeting had no problem with that tight squeeze. They ignored city planners’ recommendation to deny the request and snubbed a formula that staff has used for some 30 years to come up with such positions.
Instead, commissioners agreed with their planning and zoning board’s unanimous recommendation for approval. The site’s location at the edge of a neighborhood and enthusiastic support from four nearby homeowners appeared to have swayed the advisory board more than the city’s subdivision rules, its comprehensive plan and staff’s opinion. The homeowners, who earlier had written almost identical letters of support, told the city commission they were glad to see the lot finally developed. No one spoke in opposition.
The .87-acre lot north of Tantum Avenue, owned by the Morse Genius Foundation, is more than big enough for three residential lots, but the request sought several exceptions to the rules. The applicant wanted to create room for four homes, each about 3,500-square-feet in size, to be marketed to empty nesters. Besides the narrower lots, the applicant sought a rear setback of ten feet instead of the required 15 feet to allow rear access. Rebecca Wilson, an attorney representing the applicant, noted the mixed zoning south of the site, including an industrial building, denser residential lots and the city golf course. She argued that nearby homes on Beloit Avenue had rear access and frontages less than 60 feet.
How About Community Rights?
How About Community Rights?
Historic Preservation brings to the fore strong opinions. While anger and emotion speak louder and are more readily heard, a quiet parsing of reality leads to better governance.
Let’s start with the old neighborhoods, homes of the 1920’s. I’ve a picture of ours under construction. Homes like this were built by individuals with sensitivity to the surrounding neighborhood, born of pride in how one was perceived by friends and neighbors.
The “property rights” rallying cry is a bit curious when it comes from individuals who choose to live in this highly regulated city. We willingly live with restrictions on setbacks, floor area ratios, height limitations, side wall articulation, etc. ‘Don’t put your trash cart out a day early lest your neighbors suffer aesthetic degradation!’
Picture in your mind Park Avenue, a beautiful street of historic architecture, and replace all those buildings with downtown Celebration, Baldwin Park or Anytown USA. What do you have?
Would Saint Augustine be more beautiful if centuries-old homes could be replaced with contemporary lot-line-to-lot-line McMansions? Have the historic areas of Charleston, SC, experienced a decline in value due to “government controls?” Do property owners have a right to replace beautiful with “ugly?”
Razing a slab-on-grade, shallow-pitched ranch house from the 1950s doesn’t warrant the level of community outrage that met the proposed demolition of Casa Feliz or the Capen House. I get that, but the “art” we speak of stems from a time when home design and, indeed, our value as citizens, was focused outward. The beauty, the scale and how a home presented itself to the neighbors passing by meant everything. How the owner was perceived by the community was value enough.
Let us be good stewards of what we have. Let us persevere, and preserve.
What is a “Third Place?”
What is a “Third Place?”
Why Is It So Important?
All of us know those special “cool” places we seek out when we want to experience personal fulfillment beyond our First Place (home) and our Second Place (work).
These places have certain characteristics we enjoy. They present socially diverse, culturally engaging environments. These “social condensers” or “civic cafes” encourage open conversation and create places for all levels of a community to come together. They allow the suspension of social and political distinctions that have made us increasingly divided and isolated.
Ray Oldenburg, in The Great Good Place (1989), calls these locations Third Places. Third Places are critical to a community, according to Oldenburg. Dom Nozzi, AICP, summarizes Oldenburg’s notion of Third Places:
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They are distinctive informal gathering places, they make the citizen feel at home, they nourish relationships and a diversity of human contact, they help create a sense of place and community, they invoke a sense of civic pride, they provide numerous opportunities for serendipity, they promote companionship, they allow people to relax and unwind after a long day at work, they are socially binding, they encourage sociability instead of isolation, they make life more colorful, and they enrich public life and democracy. Their disappearance in our culture is unhealthy for our cities because . . . they are the bedrock of community life and all the benefits that come from such interaction.
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Other experts like William H. Whyte (City) and Fred Kent, Founder of Project for Public Spaces www.pps.org, have described the distinctive characteristics of a successful Third Place. It must be readily available to all groups – either free or for a nominal charge — to enter and purchase food, drink, entertainment, be educated or partake of other activities that are present within. It must be easily accessible to neighborhoods, community stakeholders and visitors. It should be a place where people feel welcome and comfortable, and where they are encouraged to enter into conversation with one another. People who go there should anticipate meeting old friends and making new ones, and they should expect to take away something they cannot normally find in other places.
Examples of important Third Places include cafes, parks, museums, libraries, playing fields, churches and bars. A good new Third Place builds its own constituency. It gets people to form routines — for example, alfresco lunches, morning lattes or the children’s storytelling time. This encourages people to use new paths. In other words, supply will create demand.
Oldenburg points out that desirable experiences will occur when there are places that are conducive to them — or they will not occur at all. When certain kinds of places are not active, certain positive experiences disappear. A Third Place is not something to look at, it is something to live within.
Today, the City of Winter Park is, itself, a Third Place. It is envied and studied by cities and planners locally, regionally and internationally. Citizens and visitors alike know and enjoy the long-ago developed Third Places within our Third Place, like Central Park, Park Avenue, Mead Gardens, museums, sidewalk dining, the golf course — the list goes on. Over time, some of these places have even changed location, like our library, hotels and post office.
As a 30-year citizen I’ve been blessed to live and raise our two daughters in Winter Park. I would encourage not only the preservation of our past and present world-class Third Places, but also ask that we all support our city’s process of envisioning our future. Continuing to create new Third Places that help further express our rich diversity and ability to socially and intellectually connect with one another may make us one of the very few cities that can continue to do what others cannot.
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