Bocora at City Center, a CIMD project approved in Boca Raton, FL. (Credit: Bocora)
Boca Raton officials will soon decide whether to modify the city’s ordinance allowing properties zoned for commercial or industrial to convert to residential space, as intense housing demand replaces much of the demand that was once envisioned for offices. The city’s Commercial-Industrial Multi-family Development ordinance – known as CIMD – enables a certain number of these sites to be rezoned to allow residential uses, as long as commercial businesses are included in order to maintain a thriving and livable community. But some officials and members of the public have cried foul at the implementation of the ordinance, holding that developers add small gyms, tutoring centers or other facilities that would usually be considered building amenities to their projects in order to fill the commercial requirement.
Such facilities, opponents of the current code hold, are indeed commercial in nature, but are open to the public only in a technical sense. In other words, an apartment or townhome community’s gym may be legally open to the public, but in practice it is really an amenity for residents. The issue came to head when just such an addition was made to the Bocora development at 6419 Congress Avenue. A planned gym was essentially converted from a private amenity to a publicly available, 2,086 square foot facility to comply with the ordinance, rather than expressly fulfill the intended purpose of sparking business development that complements a neighborhood…