Ten feet?
At the Indian River Mall?
You’ll never notice it, especially if the building is set back hundreds of feet from the roadway.
That’s the hard truth about a request from the mall’s new owner – who has brought to us a grand, three-phase concept plan to redevelop and revitalize the property by creating a town-center-type hub – to build a 45-foot-high hotel in a county with a 35-foot height limit.
Actually, it wasn’t even a request, just a preliminary and informal inquiry to gauge whether our County Commission would dare entertain the possibility.
While a majority of commissioners expressed during their Sept. 10 meeting a willingness to at least engage in a conversation regarding such a waiver, county officials say they’ve received no follow-up response from Illinois-based DTS Properties II, which purchased the 17-acre mall property in May for $14.8 million.
“The owner asked if we’d consider a 10-foot waiver, we took it to the commissioners in September, and they said they’d consider it,” Ryan Sweeney, the county’s assistant planning and development services director, said last week.
“That was two months ago, and they haven’t submitted anything since,” he added. “We haven’t heard from them, so the issue really hasn’t gone anywhere.”
Not officially, anyway.
But commissioners say they’ve heard from constituents concerned about allowing a developer to exceed the county’s height restriction – which should surprise no one.
The height limit here is considered sacred, the one remaining quality-of-life characteristic that makes our community special and distinguishes us from our neighbors to the north and south, as well as the rest of Florida’s Atlantic coast.
Unlike residents of most of the state’s coastal counties, we aren’t walled off from the ocean by an endless line of high-rise condominiums and hotels, nor are our cities’ downtowns defined by anything remotely resembling skyscrapers.
We do have the Village Spires, a pair of 13-story towers built in 1967 along Ocean Drive in Vero Beach, where the city granted a waiver to its five-story height restriction.
Now, though, they serve as a reminder of what we don’t want – for our community to become part of the South Florida megalopolis. That won’t change.
The COVID-spawned surge in the county’s population, which has already exceeded 170,000 and continues to rise, has ignited a noticeable increase in residential construction and resulted in unprecedented congestion on our roads.
And, yes, the seemingly unstoppable growth and development we’re witnessing threatens the small-town charm and intrudes on the slow-paced quality of life that made our community so special.
Many of us long-time residents can’t help but feel nostalgic about the Vero Beach of yesteryear.
So the skeptics’ concerns are not unwarranted.
But granting a 10-foot waiver to the county’s height limit for one five-story, 120-room hotel on one small parcel in a busy commercial area – on the mainland, miles west of our beaches – isn’t going to turn us into Fort Lauderdale.
Nor will it provide any meaningful precedent for future developers to cite in their attempts to evade our building codes.
Nobody here wants that.
Nobody here will allow it.
“The height limit is such a touchstone,” Commissioner Laura Moss, whose district includes most of the barrier island, said in a phone interview last week. “A number of people responded to what happened at that meeting, and it was like Armageddon.
“Even when I explained to them that the property has a rare zoning and this would apply to only a small self-contained area, it didn’t matter,” she added. “People are afraid that, if we allow something there, it would spread to other areas.”
Moss was not being critical.
She understands the fears and welcomes the input, as do the three other commissioners who said they’d be willing to discuss DTS’ reasons for seeking the waiver.
The only firm opposition came from the commission’s vice chairman, Joe Flescher, who, speaking from the dais, said: “We are known as a sunrise county, not a high-rise county. While there have been exceptions (in the past), I believe the owners should conform with the current height limits.
“We have said no to others before.”
However, there’s no good reason to say “no” this time, especially since there’s so much to be gained.
As a retail area, the mall has been a dead zone for years, having been hit hard by the “Great Recession” in 2008 and absorbing a fatal blow from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
DTS wants to resurrect the property by transforming it from a mid-20th Century indoor suburban mall to a modern multi-use community hub, containing retail stores, restaurants, apartments, a hotel and, possibly, a small private school.
The plan would require the county to change the property’s zoning to accommodate residential development. But it was the talk of waiving the height limit for the proposed hotel that grabbed the community’s attention.
“I’ve caught a little hell over it, but I don’t want to kill the deal over 10 feet,” Commissioner Joe Earman said. “Everything we’ve heard about this developer has been positive, and we’ve got a tremendous opportunity to do something big here.”
To be sure, the four commissioners open to a discussion regarding the height limit – Moss, Earman, Deryl Loar and Chairwoman Susan Adams – were making no guarantees.
Some mentioned the possibility of granting the waiver in exchange for DTS designating at least some of the residential development to meet the county’s growing need for affordable workforce housing.
“When somebody asks you to make a change that benefits them, it’s an opportunity to ask for something that benefits you,” Adams said. “So, if DTS wants something, maybe they should give us something in return.”
It’s worth a shot.
But if DTS rejects the affordable-housing pitch – if the developer needs that additional floor to make the hotel profitable – the commission should not let 10 feet be a deal breaker.
“Something needs to happen out there,” Loar said, referring to the mall, which was built in 1996 and is becoming an eyesore. “I like the developer’s idea. They’ve certainly checked all the boxes. It could become another downtown-type place.
“I know some people are saying the developer knew what he was getting into when he bought the property,” he added. “That’s true, but there’s no harm in asking, and that’s all they did.”
Joe Scarfone, owner of the ONE Investment Group that brokered the mall’s sale, did not respond last weekend to a text message asking if DTS planned to formally request a height-limit waiver.
Given DTS’ silence, however, Sweeney said it’s unlikely the commissioners will need to address the matter again before the end of the year.
“This was a spotlight item,” he added, “so maybe they want to let the dust settle.”
Let’s hope so – because the forward-looking DTS plan for the mall is exciting, even spectacular, and if its vision becomes a reality, it would provide our community with another gathering place outside the Vero Beach city limits.
“I think it’s good that people are concerned, and I believe all of us in this community are in synch on this,” Moss said. “Nobody wants to see high-rises built here.”
She’s correct. But a 45-foot-high hotel is not a high rise.
And in case you hadn’t noticed: The height limit in downtown Vero Beach is 50 feet.