A possible plan to put apartments and hotel rooms on a vacant anchor store and parking lot at the Mall at Wellington Green has village officials scrambling to update development rules written before anyone contemplated that happening.
One modification approved 7-0 by Wellington’s Planning, Zoning & Adjustment Board on Wednesday, Nov. 20 attempts to make clear that up to 22 dwelling units per acre could be allowed in certain circumstances.
It is up to the Wellington Village Council to decide on the rule tweaks, probably in two readings in December and January, and ultimately to vote on any development plan that materializes. The proposed rules don’t force the council to approve or reject any particular density level, though they do set some basic starting points for discussion.
“I’m just trying to picture it in my head, because 22 dwelling units per acre is a lot in and of itself,” PZA Board Member Tatiana Yaques said.
Another measure approved unanimously by the board funnels conditions of approval for the mall area into a central master plan, instead of spread out over multiple development agreements.
If conversations at a council workshop earlier this year are any guide, a redevelopment proposal could be coming for the central mall area. Housing has been approved in perimeter areas over time, but not at the core mall.
Yaques asked about the 22 dwellings per acre.
“What would that look like on a parcel?” she asked.
That could mean multi-story apartment buildings and could apply to a project that also includes commercial properties, open space or other amenities, staff members said.
“One of the things that we’re looking at obviously is the mall, where if there is an opportunity for redevelopment of that specific site, it’s probably going to be costly to acquire it,” PZA Board Chair John Bowers said. “So, you’ve got to have enough density to really warrant the amount of expense that’s going to go into it.”
Bowers expressed concern that even if such a project ultimately attracts village approval at the mall, perhaps on the rationale it’s on land already paved over and not currently in productive use, it opens the door to sites elsewhere that might be deemed “mixed use” and manage to pack in a lot of housing density.
The rules discussions come after a decades-long history of the mall’s blockbuster arrival and subsequent economic challenges. In 1996, the mall project received approval for development of the 466-acre site southwest of Forest Hill Blvd. and State Road 7. At various times, Palm Beach County and Wellington served as approving authorities, with plenty of amendments getting an OK over the years.
The trouble, as village staff came to see it, was that conditions of such approvals became unhelpfully enshrined in an overabundance of zoning, master plan and “development of regional impact” agreements. That would later be viewed as unnecessarily duplicative, and even resulting in inconsistencies when, say, the master plan was amended but the other agreements were not.
“If conditions are duplicated in all three documents, you are forced to process unnecessary amendments each time, which is why this is no longer common practice,” a village staff report explained.
So, the idea became to delete conditions in some documents as a “clean-up” amendment for the Wellington Green project. This would clear the way for the master plan to serve as the controlling document, officials said.
“So, this request is essentially the way this is done, regardless of whether it may have been done differently in the past?” PZA Board Member Elizabeth Mariaca asked.
“Correct,” said Damian Newell, a senior planner with the village.
Meanwhile, amendments the board approved to Wellington’s comprehensive plan carry somewhat wider implications for clarifying how dense housing can get in projects from K-Park south of the mall to land the village recently annexed north of Southern Blvd.
Still, it was the mall that loomed large in this discussion.
In an April workshop with the council, mall operators at the Spinoso Real Estate Group aired ideas for what to do with vacant space once occupied by Nordstrom, along with plenty of empty parking spaces associated with it.
The discussion touched on residences for up to 1,000 people, hotels and community green space.
A basic component of the pitch was that malls have to evolve to survive. That can mean bringing in office space in some places around the country, though in this instance, the attention was on apartments, hotel rooms, pickleball courts, holiday tree spaces or other things, said Carmen Spinoso, chair of the Spinoso Real Estate Group.
At the workshop, Mayor Michael Napoleone asked what would happen if Wellington said no thanks, we’re already getting enough dense housing in other projects in the pipeline.
“If it’s just like, ‘Hey, we’re going to do these other projects, and we’re not going to let the mall do anything,’ I think that would be a very negative impact on the mall,” Spinoso said. “It would be looked at as old and outmoded and nothing happening. We have all this attention go somewhere else, and the biggest taxpayer in the market is further impaired.”
