What Will Downtown Niceville Look Like?
In Brief:
•AVCON unveiled New Orleans/Mobile/Old Pensacola-inspired design guidelines for the “Old Town Landing” project to the Niceville CRA, emphasizing wind resistance and energy efficiency.
•The guidelines, while not mandatory, aim to guide developers in maintaining a cohesive aesthetic for the six-acre waterfront area.
•The city plans to issue an RFP to developers, with options to retain, sell, or enter a public-private partnership for the land’s developme
A New Orleans/Mobile/Old Pensacola feel will dominate the area known as the “Old Town Landing” in Niceville if the firm that the city charged with creating design standards in the six-acre waterfront off Bayshore has its way.
AVCON unveiled its design standards to the Niceville Community Redevelopment Agency, which comprises the city council and mayor, at their monthly meeting in October.
These design standards would be a part of the RFP, or request for proposal, that the city would put out to the development community as a standard by which a developer who got the right to develop the project from the city would have to conform to. ” these could be design guidelines that that we give to developers when they come in to develop other properties adjacent to the landing just To keep that consistent esthetic and upgraded or elevated design that we’re looking for in a redevelopment scheme,” Deputy City Administrator Kristen Shell told the CRA.
But, much like the Pirates Code in Pirates of the Caribbean, the standards are ‘more like guidelines.’ “They are not requirements,” said AVCON’s representative at the CRA meeting, Tonia Nation, “The idea would not be to lock up the developers at this point. It will help portray the city’s vision for this area.”
The guide presented to the commission includes preferred materials for walls, roofing, siding, windows, doors, gutters, site elements, landscape elements, and more.
The primary concerns, according to AVCON, in addition to aesthetic presentation, were wind resistance and energy efficiency.
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Next Steps for The Downtown Niceville ‘Old Town Landing’ Project
The city still has a long way to go – and many decisions to make – before the ‘Old Town Landing’ project is done.
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One of the following decisions city leaders will have to make concerns what kind of project residents and visitors will see. The city could decide to keep control of the land it currently owns and serve as a landlord in the long term. It could enter a public-private partnership over the land, working as a hybrid model. Finally, it could put rules and guidelines in place through a sale agreement and sell the land to a developer to do the work of building and finding tenants.
At least one city councilperson, Cathy Alley, noted that she would like to hold on to the land – as the land which is currently occupied by The First Bank used to be city property. “I think that Niceville has sold property before which we should not have sold,” Alley said, “for instance, The [First] Bank, which was the old library. It would be such an anchor to this project. So I have a concern about that.”
As voted by the CRA, the immediate next step will be to take the guidelines and create an RFP to solicit potential developers. Should the developer not take the bait and ask to move forward with a concept, the CRA and the city must return to the drawing board.
But Deputy City Manager Shell told the council there are several developers and commercial real estate agents chomping at the bit to get a chance to develop in this area – especially after the city redid some language in their development strictures to increase the density in the CRA area. “We’ve made some inroads with that,” Shell said, “Niceville is open for business.”
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