- October 28, 2024
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Palm Coast’s Town Center is now 18 years old, and the City Council took stock of how it’s grown — and where it’s going — during a council workshop on Feb. 9.
"Online shopping has allowed for that virtual experience, and so we do have the ability to look at how it was originally designated and talk about the overall vision today."
— MILISSA HOLLAND, Palm Coast mayor
Town Center was supposed to be a walkable, bike-able downtown urban center with plenty of retail. It hasn’t quite made it there, and, with the rise of online shopping devaluing brick-and-mortar retail, the city’s vision for the land may shift.
“Things changed throughout this time period,” Palm Coast Mayor Milissa Holland said at the workshop. “We saw the downturn of the economy; that’s why it sat dormant for many years. We now have Amazon. The brick-and-mortar retail has changed dramatically. Online shopping has allowed for that virtual experience, and so we do have the ability to look at how it was originally designated and talk about the overall vision today, trying to account for future opportunities.”
As designed, Town Center has a variety of land uses, said Jason DeLorenzo, Palm Coast’s Chief Development Officer, in a presentation at the workshop. There’s residential, office, retail, commercial, institutional and educational, a movie theater, lodging and assisted living.
Some uses at Town Center are already maxxed out, or getting close: The land has entitlements for 2,400 movie theater seats, and those area already there, in Epic Theatres. The “lodging” category, which includes some assisted living facilities as well as hotels/motels, is 68% full.
But only about 22% of the 2,500 allowable residential units have been completed so far, and only about 23% of the 2 million allowable square feet of retail commercial have been used, DeLorenzo said.
The city can change those uses if it needs to.
“You can convert the uses as it’s growing to fit what the needs are at the time,” DeLorenzo said.
Increasing residential development will help drive commercial development, DeLorenzo said.
Other factors not considered back during Town Center’s infancy in 2003 include recent plans by the University of North Florida and Jacksonville University to build educational facilities in Town Center. Both are planning temporary use of the existing City Centre building until construction is complete, DeLorenzo said.
Councilman Ed Danko urged DeLorenzo make sure that the temporary realities of the pandemic don’t skew city staff’s analysis of what Town Center could become.
“I just want to make sure, on the brick-and-mortar, that we don’t make determinations too early coming out of COVID,” Danko said. “I’ve got a personal feeling — and it’s just my gut feeling — that people are going to want to get back out into reality again and be around other people and work in office spaces and go shopping. I don’t want us to jump too far ahead until we see where we end up at the end of this year — hopefully before the end of this year.”
DeLorenzo said there will be a robust evaluation.
