A high-end, gated, 300-unit apartment complex is going up on the 27-acre squarish parcel across the street from Imagine School at Town Center. It is to be the first of two such apartment complexes in that area.
The Palm Coast Planning Board in a 5-0 vote recommended approval of the complex Wednesday evening. The complex is to be called The Legacy at Palm Coast Town Center, though a developer representative in his presentation to the board called it Arden at Palm Coast.
The project will be the work of Landmark Companies, a national builder of apartment complexes, including the Muse at Winter Garden and the Landmark apartments in Kissimmee, where prices range from $1,544 a month to $3,958 a month, for one, two and three-bedroom apartments sized between 655 and 1,400 square feet.
The apartment complex will be at the corner of Town Center Boulevard and Lake Avenue. Lake Avenue dead-ends a few hundred yards to the west right now, just after Hawthorne Avenue, which leads into the new Gables subdivision of Paytas homes already getting peopled with residents, though only a fraction of that development’s 208 houses have been built. But plans are afoot for Lake Avenue to connect with its twin at the western part of Town Center, along City Hall, thus creating a new throughway for the added housing.
There are almost 10 acres of wetlands on the proposed apartment complex’s land, so the development will be restricted to 18 acres.
Four of the complex’s eight buildings will be four-story high, reaching heights of 55 feet, and four will be three-story high. The buildings will total 128 one-bedroom units, 140 two-bedroom units, and 32 three-bedroom units.
The complex will include the routine amenities of apartment complexes: Clubhouse with pool at its center, a pickleball court–the complex will be marketed to seniors–gazebo, fire pit, and a kayak launch, two dog parks and a second covered picnic and gazebo area. There’ll be entrances and exits both on Town Center Boulevard and Lake Avenue.
The land is part of the Town Center Development of Regional Impact, and the Town Center Community Redevelopment Area, which means that all property tax revenue is to be spent only in that CRA. It also means that, past a certain, very low threshold, all the tax revenue goes to the CRA: the school board gets its share, but the county does not. That’s in effect until the expiration of the CRA in 2033.
The complex is required to have 527 parking spaces. The developer is asking to squeeze by with 520. The planning board had no objections.
Alliant Engineering’s Adam Oestman told the planning board that the Palm Coast apartment prices would be in the $2,000 range, but stressed that he was only guessing: he had not been briefed on the actual cost, and higher end apartments are commanding higher rent than that in Palm Coast.
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Even at a lower range, the fact that Oestman referred to the apartments as higher end triggered yet another discussion among planning board members about the lack of affordable housing in the city, and the fear, among some members, that even apartments are pricing out working class tenants.
“Every time that there’s a proposal to do a lower cost apartment, people come out of the woodwork, so it’s tough to try to solve,” Clint Smith, the planning board’s chair, said, though there hasn’t been a proposed apartment development catering to the working class in years. Not in Palm Coast.
Larry Gorss, an alternate board member, didn’t think Palm Coast was “at that place’ where it could absorb 300 apartment units, but Smith reminded him that every apartment complex in town is at capacity, regardless of its rental prices, a further indication that the city and the county don’t merely have an affordable housing crisis on their hands, but simply a housing crisis. Flagler County is not unique in that regard. By one estimate, the country is 5 million housing units short of need, while, according to the Census Bureau’s latest calculation, 40 percent of renters spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
In Flagler County, the median rent, according to the Census Bureau, was $1,416. That was for the five-year survey period ending in 2021, after which costs rose sharply.
“It’s been my experience that these folks are not going to invest multi-millions of dollars if that’s what this project is going to cost, if they didn’t do their homework,” William Whitson, the former Flagler Beach city manager now representing the school board on the planning board, said, though developers’ “homework” has not quite been the reliable indicator Whitson or anyone else with memories of the still-recent Great Crash would make it out to be: risk and speculation are still factors in the equation. But the numbers are in developers’ favor at the moment.
“Five years ago there were several projects that came before this board just like this,” Smith said, likely referring to the other Town Center apartments along Central Avenue and Bulldog Drive, “and members of the public were there saying, who can afford to be in these things? And all of them are full. So apparently, it’s working.”
Smith’s observation however paralleled rather than dispelled the affordable housing question: the local housing shortage, and the influx of better-off retirees (as opposed to younger, less wealthy families) would naturally fill what’s available, but would not diminish or resolve the unaffordability leading to evictions that local social service agencies are witnessing. For example, the county’s rent assistance pot has run out for the year.
Before long, Smith reminded his colleagues that the discussion had taken the board far afield of the matter at hand. The board voted to approve the Legacy apartments, and the meeting adjourned. The recommendation must go before the City Council for ratification.
The Legacy at Palm Coast for 8-16-21 PB
