Month: June 2015

The Historic Preservation Board will be having a work session (no public comment) on Wednesday, June 17 at 6 PM at city hall to discuss the draft ordinance and input from the May 7th public meetings. Click here to email members of the Historic Preservation Board (HPB) and ask them to re-think the current draft ordinance. “Especially in politics, any relationship between the effect of policy, the goal of policy and the stated goal is often incidental to the point of randomness.” Holman Jenkins Jr. In this post I analyze the stated goals, actual goals, and the effects of our current…

The following is a brief history of Winter Park single family residential zoning resulting from my research of the zoning code and discussions with city staff.   Residential zoning in Winter Park started in the 1930’s (before that you could build anything). From 1930 to 1985 criteria limiting the size of a home was primarily a 35% footprint, meaning a two story home could have as much as 70% floor area. In today’s terms (Floor Area Ratio) a typical 13,000 square foot lot could have a house with as much as 9,100 square feet. As a practical matter there was no limitation….