City Owes it to VOTA to Get it Right on Key Parcel

At a workshop Wednesday, the Bradenton City Council heard pitches from investors who’d like to purchase and develop a long-vacant 3.5-acre parcel of city-owned land on the 1400 block of 14th Street West. Whatever the city decides, officials owe it to the surrounding neighborhood to get it right, something that, given the city’s track record, many residents don’t have an awful lot of confidence in.

The parcel, which sits across from the Bradenton Police Department substation, once housed a now-demolished motel. It occupies an important part of the U.S. 41 corridor that city officials have long spoken of revitalizing. Perhaps more importantly, it is also part of the Village of the Arts Economic Overlay District, a potential city jewel that’s never received the sort of attention and investment needed to help exploit its tremendous potential.

Once a thriving commercial vein of the city, the immediate neighborhood consists mostly of other flophouse motels, vacant buildings, low-end commercial, and other signs of urban blight. The parcel itself is less than two blocks from the Salvation Army shelter, where large portions of the city’s homeless population regularly congregate at all hours. It would not be difficult to argue that it is the city’s most distressed commercial corridor.

Local commercial builder Mike Carter has offered the city $750,000 for the land if he can develop a three-story Safeguard Self Storage facility. Carter said he would also build 14 small rental cottages on the back side, where the property abuts residential houses in the VOTA, and that the storage facility itself would be designed to look like an apartment complex. The $8 million development would also include a courtyard in the residential portion, which Carter said could be used for VOTA events, calling it "a continuation of the village,“ rather than something new and different.

Catalyst Community Development presented a plan to purchase the land for $800,000 and build a 260-unit apartment complex on the parcel, with company president Joe Bonora saying they had dropped plans for an affordable housing component and would offer units with rents on studio, one and two bedroom units ranging from about $1,150 to $1,400 a month.

The complex would consist of a six-story apartment building along the Tamiami Trail and another five-story one along 13th Street West. There would be a three-story parking garage between them. Bonora said the design would reflect the neighborhood with things like "vibrant colors“ and that he planned to meet with VOTA residents to talk about using local art in the project and address concerns they may have.

Residents giving comment at the workshop seemed apprehensive. Some worried that the already challenged parking situation in VOTA would worsen if any residential development did not include plenty of spaces–a valid point, to be sure. On the surface, the apartment complex certainly seems like a more attractive option. There is a lack of such housing inventory near the downtown area, and its location is ideal for such density, though there’s an argument to be made that fewer stories and lower density would be a better fit. That said, attracting young professionals to that part of Bradenton would certainly benefit the Village and its surrounding businesses like Motorworks and Darwins and could also serve as something of a southwestern lynchpin for the neighborhood.

Yet another self-storage facility is much less exciting and exactly the sort of thing one would expect to find in a corridor that has become increasingly industrial over the years, its design promises notwithstanding. The 14 rental cottages are a nice touch and would provide at least some additional housing inventory for the area and could be a good fit for the neighborhood, though putting 350-400 people on the footprint might make more sense.

What’s perhaps most important is that the council members move slowly in coming to a final decision. When they do decide the parcel’s future, they would also do well to make it clear that whatever vision is sold to the community must and will actually come to fruition. Case in point, Riversong Apartments, which were built on the city-owned, riverfront "sand pile“ in 2011. The long-planned development of the site had grandiose beginnings that were supposed to transform the baron portion of the riverfront that languished across U.S. 301 from the rest of downtown.

Residential condos, retail shops, and restaurants were supposed to surround the new Manatee Performing Arts Center, with talk of an adjacent hotel. In the end, the developers were allowed to throw up some rather ordinary apartments, toss out the ground floor retail, and benefit from expensive, publicly-financed riverfront amenities that drove up the value of their investment. All they had to do was keep coming back to the city council and claim that the current economic climate wouldn’t support their old plans.

Rather than saying, Look, we’ve got one shot at getting this very valuable asset right, and if now is not the time to do so, we’re happy to wait, officials caved time and again. The vision sold to the community has still never come to fruition, despite such an enormous investment of public resources. MPAC sits out there by itself without the sort of synergistic enterprises that were supposed to surround it. A transformation, it is not.

That said, the skepticism of those who’ve invested their time and money in the Village of the Arts is certainly warranted. They want the city to get this parcel right and aren’t entirely confident that will happen, given its track record on such development. While there is some new blood at City Hall, the majority of leadership remains the same as in 2011. Let’s hope our so-called leaders have learned a lesson and history does not repeat itself.