- October 6, 2024
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As Palm Coast wraps up the final leg of its Imagine: 2050 comprehensive plan update, the city is looking for ways to include more diverse and affordable housing in its future.
The comprehensive plan update began with gathering community input on what residents want to see for the future of their city. Consulting firm JBPro has been leading the process, and they are using that community feedback to frame the city’s goals.
When the city incorporated in 1999, state statute required cities to create a comprehensive plan, which lead to the city’s 2035 comprehensive plan. Palm Coast adopted that plan in 2004.
Now, Palm Coast is updating that comprehensive plan with “Imagine 2050.” The new comprehensive plan, when finalized, will outline the city’s growth plans over the coming decades.
The plan's outline for Palm Coast’s future housing — presented to the Palm Coast City Council on July 23 — primarily focuses on ways to promote diverse housing opportunities in the city, including incentivizing developers, allowing a variety of lot sizes and providing different types of housing options that are integrated into standard residential neighborhoods.
Deputy Chief Development Officer Ray Tyner said they are calling these diverse housing opportunities as "life-stage housing."
"It includes a spectrum of residential options tailored to meet the diverse needs and circumstances of individuals and families across various stages of life," Tyner said.
The needs of an individual just starting out or as a retiree, he said, are much different than that of a family of three.
However it is described, planning board member Sandra Shank reminded the council during public comment that "affordable" just means that individuals are not spending more than 30% of their income on housing, regardless of how expensive the home is.
"Affordability does not mean low quality," Shank said.
Integrating the more affordable housing into residential neighborhoods is also important, council member Theresa Carli Pontieri said.
"When we cluster things, that's kind of where you start to see a dip in the quality of life in certain areas," Pontieri said. "I don't want to see that for our workforce residents, they should be able to live in the same neighborhoods and have the same amenities as our other residents.”
Tyner pointed out that the comprehensive plan is a “35,000-foot” view of the city’s goals.
The comprehensive plan acts like a guideline and roadmap for how a city grows and develops, he said. Policies and regulations are then derived from these overarching goals, ideally shaping how the city grows in the following decades.
Once the comprehensive plan is finished, Tyner said, city staff will go through and update its land development code accordingly.
The LDC changes will be where the effective rules and regulations that enforce the ideas in the comprehensive plan will come from.
Council member Cathy Heighter pointed out that regardless of what its called, putting in place economic development policies needs to go hand-in-hand with ensuring housing affordability.
Discussing the changes to housing was one of the last items in the draft of the new plan to be reviewed, which also included sections on the city's future land use designations, transportation goals and capital improvements.
Residents can review each section of the comprehensive plan and provide feedback by going to palmcoast.mysocialpinpoint.com which is the interactive website for the Imagine: 2050 project.
Tyner said the Aug. 13 workshop will be an update on all of the responses the comprehensive plan team has received on the draft from City Council, the Palm Coast Planning Board and from the public. Then, at the Aug. 27 meeting, the updated plan gets sent to the state for approval, he said, before returning to Palm Coast.
Around Oct. 15, the plan will be finalized and ready for the city's adoption, pending any recommended changes from the state, Tyner said.
