Between 2002 and 2008, within a few blocks of the spot in Florida where I sit writing this, a single developer completed four high-rises with a total of 459 luxury condos and 253 hotel rooms. But contain your excitement, all you transit-oriented development fans—there’s no high-capacity transit stop on Clearwater Beach, where I’m staying with relatives this week.
As you can see in the photos, these new projects are outrageously out of scale with their context. And the tower pedestals stuffed with parking decks form a massive barrier along the beachfront.
Meanwhile, back in Seattle, folks recently filed an appeal over a proposal to raise allowed building heights from four to six stories over a few blocks directly adjacent to a light rail station—a proposal that came out of a year-long public process and is intended to promote sustainability at the regional scale.
Different worlds.
Every unit in the JMC Resort Property Services condo projects noted above was sold long before the buildings were finished—people entered lotteries and waited in line for the opportunity to buy in advance. But now, the vast majority of the units in those towers are dark at night.
Owners of most condos in the first two projects that went up (of three that were eventually built) flipped their units before the bust. So while many of the original speculators escaped unscathed, most of the current owners are underwater. The timing of the most recently completed project was such that dozens of the original buyers simply walked away, forfeiting their deposits of tens of thousands, and in some cases, hundreds of thousands, of dollars.
Advance buyers at several downtown Seattle condo have found themselves in a similar predicament. But keep in mind that Clearwater Beach is just a small spit of land adjacent to a city of 110,000, as opposed to the downtown of a major west coast city.
JMC had another large luxury condo project planned on the south end of Clearwater Beach, and in 2006 demolished a perfectly good nine-story Holiday Inn to make way for it. That project has yet to break ground, the last of nine nearby projects valued at $1.4 billion to succumb to a similar fate.
And Clearwater Beach is littered with smaller scale examples of the same story. The ubiquitous empty lots surrounded by chain link fences create a war-zone like ambiance that’s incongruous with the condos’ beach surroundings.
The hubris of these projects makes Seattle’s most embarrassing aborted projects—500 East Pine, The 1, Greenlake Vitamilk, 8th and Seneca—seem almost quaint in comparison.
One developer, six years, four high rise projects, on Clearwater Beach, FL (click to enlarge)
