Rosemary Overlay District = SUCCESS!!! - Winter 2017

The Rosemary Residential Overlay District (RROD) was enacted by the Sarasota City Commission in 2014 to encourage additional development in the city’s Rosemary’s District, an area north of Fruitville Road that had failed to enjoy a similar economic resurgence to downtown’s over the past decade. Since then, developers have embarked on at least a half-dozen projects that will add more than 1,000 apartments, retail, 100 condominiums and hotel rooms to the area bounded by Fruitville, 10th Street, Orange and Cocoanut avenues. The decision to allow triple density, up to 75 units per acre, compared to the rest of Rosemary District at 25 units per acre and downtown core at 50 units per acre, has helped usher tremendous success, by bringing new residents into an area to support and increase storefront and restaurant occupancy. Apartment projects like Urban Flats, CitySide and Elan Rosemary will almost certainly spark the renaissance that city leaders have long desired. But while dramatic and seemingly overnight, the district’s success also was easily predictable. Allowing additional density made the economics of new product much more viable. However, the district also is scheduled to sunset in February 2018, or whenever 1,775 new residential units have been permitted, whichever occurs first. Harshman & Co. hopes that the Rosemary initiative will serve as a model for rehabilitating other areas of the city that need new investment. Clearly, without the density bonus that the overlay district provided, the Rosemary area would not be experiencing such renewal.