Article
Courtesy of The Palm Beach Post
By Tony
Doris
Published February 21, 2016
They bought luxury condos in downtown West Palm, a city
aspiring to livability, walkability, urban vitality — all the benefits of
close-in living.
Now a developer plans a 14-story,
150-room hotel less than 75 feet from the 21-story, 467-unit
Two City Plaza. Dozens of the
condos at 701 S. Olive Ave., which were completed in 2008,
will have views blocked, or balconies facing commercial air
conditioning units and restaurant vents. Trying to leave or
enter their garage, the condo residents will share their
one-lane, one-way access road, Trinity Place, with hotel
delivery trucks and 90 additional rush hour cars a day, if
they’re to trust the developer’s estimate, which many
suspect is understated.
Now, residents are fuming. |
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Site for new hotel behind Two City Plaza.
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Representatives of Driftwood Acquisition and Development
met with residents of Two City Plaza Feb. 18, in a packed City Hall meeting
room where the developers hoped to assuage neighbors’ concerns and gather
suggestions on how the Canopy hotel design might be tweaked to reduce
negative impacts. The overwhelming sentiment expressed in the
standing-room-only crowd of 150: The best tweak would be to build the hotel
elsewhere.
“My property values are in the dumps,” one man told the hotel developer’s
representatives, which included their lawyer, architect, traffic engineer
and construction manager. “I’m angry and I hope everybody else is. It’s not
about you guys, it’s about a property right in my face! When I wake up and
open up my eyes, I’m going to be looking at that building.”
The meeting is one that city officials and residents can expect to see play
out over and over again, as West Palm Beach undergoes a $2.5 billion
building boom and the very density the city sought to revitalize downtown
threatens to detract from it.
“The city’s beautiful now. We don’t need more,” another Two City Plaza
resident said. “How much is enough? Where does it end?”A ‘boutique hotel’
experience
The firm’s Miami lawyer, Javier Fernandez, and architect, Lawrence Beame, of
Coconut Grove, sought to highlight the “boutique hotel” positives.
At 14 floors, the hotel will be far shorter than the 25-story maximum city
rules allowed. Part of the reason it can be shorter is because of space
saved by having cars lifted by elevators into its garage. At 65-feet wide,
the hotel will be narrower than the condo tower, Beame added. The western
face of the hotel will feature “an art wall” with different colors of glass
in patterns and shapes, “an iconic feature for our guests who are driving in
from the west,” he said.
The architectural podium of the hotel will be the same height as the condo’s
podium, so no unit owners will stare into the garage, they said. The east
wall of the hotel has been designed without windows, in deference to
residents’ concerns that hotel rooms would face their condos.
On the south side of the hotel, which is 72 feet from the neighboring condo,
hotel windows will be set into the building and angled facing west,
directing views away from the condo, Beame said.
Will traffic be an issue?
Cars will approach the hotel through a recessed area on its north, where
valets will move them into the lifts. Traffic engineer John Kim said the
project, with room for five cars lined up at once, surpassed city
requirements. “We think we’re good from a queuing standpoint,” he said.
But many complained that traffic already backs up on the network of one-way
streets that encircles the condo — South Dixie Highway, Okeechobee
Boulevard, Olive and Trinity. Service vehicles and guest cars will make
matters worse, condo residents said.
One mentioned that All Aboard Florida’s high-speed service will add 32
trains a day through downtown, further complicating traffic with street
closings. “And that’s without the Tent Site being developed and Opera Place.
And there are no more roads. In fact the city wants to slow some of the
roads. All of these things are converging and you’re saying, ‘hey, there’s
no problem.’”
Others worried about views, and noise from the air conditioning units, and
venting of carbon dioxide from the hotel garage. One resident, Michael
Maschio, said after the meeting that the real estate agent who showed him
Two City Plaza indicated nothing would be built in the vacant lot to the
west. A number of his neighbors have told him they were told the same, he
said. Now his view toward Clear Lake will be blocked, he said.
The reality is that the hotel site owner has the same development rights as
the condo developer did, Ana Maia Aponte, the city’s senior urban design
planner, told the gathered neighbors. “It’s a challenge. You can’t take away
rights from property owners.”
Not everyone opposed the hotel.
“I’m for the project,” one man said. “It will have the lowest traffic impact
of use that might go on the site, it will ease concerns of violent crime by
being open 24 hours a day, it will provide property tax and sales tax
revenue and generate demand for other downtown businesses, he said. “It’s a
winner. We should be focusing on what things we can get the developer to
commit to…. If we could stop it, I’m for it. If we can force people not to
build there, great. But it’s America. We have a constitution.”
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