Kicking off the first day of summer, the City of St. Petersburg held a public meeting last night to show off plans and get input on how to grow the increasingly busy SunRunner bus line. Planners say connecting the busy downtown urban center to the popular gulf coast beachfronts while providing housing and employment opportunities is essential to attracting new residents, but also preserving the character of existing neighborhoods. SunRunner rides are free until October this year, and ridership has increased month after month since October last year. Elizabeth Abernethy is the Director of Planning and Development services for the City of St. Petersburg and said they want to make housing opportunities more diverse, accessible, and affordable around several service routes.
“And making sure our development regulations allow for some of those flexibilities is the work that we have been going through dating back to 2019. So we’ve been progressing through the different areas of our city and through the different areas of our code, and opening up different opportunities. So for example, we’ve expanded the ability to have an accessory dwelling unit citywide. And that was something we accomplished last year, we created a new zoning designation that allows up to four units on what would typically be a single family lot. That was something we got approved last March. So now we’re looking at these commercial corridors and the SunRunner corridor to see what changes do we need to make there to support SunRunner and support the corridors and provide some other different types of housing opportunities for those that want to be in St. Pete.”
The SunRunner runs East down 1st Ave S, and West along 1st Ave North, but the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority and Forward Pinellas are partnering with the City of St. Petersburg to look at mixed-use developments around intersecting streets at 22nd Street and 32nd Street, and looking at a quarter mile radius around those stations for possible mixed-use business and residential developments.
Proposed changes will not include single-family parcels located in protected or historic districts. Abernethy said the type of changes will depend on the current character of neighborhoods.
“There’s also a Grand Central Master Plan effort underway, there have been community meetings focusing on the Grand Central district, specifically from the interstate to 31st Street and 34th Street, which is overlapping with these two urban stations. So we’re getting feedback through that process as well. And it does bring in both the property owners and the adjacent neighborhoods. As we move west and we look at the neighborhood stations, we will have more interaction with the traditional single family type neighborhoods because that’s what you see as you move west. These are very mixed use areas now with a variety of land use types, everything from industrial to multifamily to single family there’s a lot of mix of uses in that Grand Central section.”
Another meeting will be held next week on June 28th to allow the public to view proposed zoning changes at the St. Pete College Midtown Campus at 5:30 pm.
June 21 presentation:
SunRunner 22nd & 32nd Street Charrette
Forward Pinellas Study:
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