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MIAMI
Developers take the required 'open space' to new heights
Many Miami high-rises have met a city requirement for 'open space' by taking it aloft. Today, the City Commission will consider closing the loophole and requiring fees from those who take the high road later.BY ANDRES VIGLUCCIaviglucci@herald.com Like every Miami building, the Club at Brickell Bay in the city's high-rise Brickell district was required to leave some open space on its property, and it did -- 14 floors up, atop the parking garage. There, developer Tibor Hollo installed a private pool deck, shaded by trees, inaccessible and invisible to all but building residents. Hollo flouted no rules. Like virtually every developer of a major high-rise in Miami for at least the past 10 years, if not longer, Hollo took advantage of a glaring loophole in the city's open-space ordinance: It doesn't mandate that the required open space be at ground level. The result, critics say, has been a proliferation of concrete canyons where sunlight barely penetrates, and a freebie for developers relieved of the responsibility of delivering an intended public benefit. They say the phenomenon has reached new heights with the downtown development boom, in particular in the Brickell district, where new skyscrapers crowd in on narrow streets, filling lots virtually end to end and obscuring views of water and sky. ''They have let people use the roofs of buildings as open space, and that's reduced it to nothing,'' said Robert McCabe, a neighborhood activist and former Miami Dade College president, who has long been critical of the practice. ``Some of these spaces are nice. But you need to have spaces that serve the public, not just the people who live in a building.'' A VOTE TODAY The Miami City Commission is now poised to bring an end to what some commissioners call an absurdity. They are expected to give final approval today to a revamped ordinance that would require the open space to be on the ground. It also provides an option many developers are likely to choose: If, as often happens, a lot is too tight or land values too high to set aside much land, developers could still hoist the required open space up in the air -- at a price. They would pay $50 into a proposed new Parks and Open Space Trust Fund for every square foot of required open space elevated above ground. The fund would be used to acquire land for new parks or public spaces, or for improvements to existing ones. The new fund would complement a proposal for sharply increased impact fees charged to developers for parks, a measure also up for final commission approval today. Although the new ordinances would not apply to buildings that have been completed or have already filed formal applications with the city, together both initiatives could still generate millions of dollars for Miami's long-underfunded parks system, among the smallest in the country for a city of its size. A review of about a half-dozen recent condo plans on file with the city show open-space requirements -- a percentage of lot area that varies by location and type of building -- running from 17,000 square feet to 78,000 square feet. That would mean substantial potential yields, as much as $850,000 to $3.5 million per project. The new open-space rules don't alter a separate ''green'' ordinance, which has always required a certain amount of landscaping at ground level, nor do they affect setback requirements. But Hollo, long one of Miami's leading residential high-rise developers, said the new ordinance would hamstring developers in Brickell and downtown Miami, where sky-high land prices would make projects financially unfeasible if developers are forced to set aside land at ground level. And making developers pay to put it elsewhere is unfair, he said. ''Such a fund could do lots of good, but it cannot be citywide,'' Hollo said. ``It's a penalty and would be a discouragement.'' CLASH OF CONCEPTS The practice of elevating required open space runs counter to city planners' drive to create an attractive, pedestrian-friendly urban landscape, said Miami Commissioner Johnny Winton, who proposed the new ordinance. Winton said he was unaware of the loophole until McCabe pointed it out to him. ''It's not rational,'' Winton said. ``It's no more public than their air-conditioning unit. The whole idea is to have a certain amount of open space available at street level that creates an ambience and makes pedestrians want to get out on the street. If you have nothing but concrete and long blank walls, nobody's going to walk.'' Yet nearly every hotel and mid- to high-rise residential building approved in the past several years has done it, from the exclusive Four Seasons and Espirito Santo Plaza towers on Brickell to smaller buildings now under construction across the city. So do massive new residential plans now under review, such as the proposed 850-foot-tall 1101 Brickell condo tower. Plans by developer Leviev Boymelgreen and architect Kobi Karp call for counting a 17th-floor pool deck in the project's required open space. But the project will also provide public plazas and broad walkways at street level, Karp said. He added that elevated amenity decks, which are usually landscaped, do have a public benefit, serving as rooftop gardens visible from surrounding towers. ''In cities such as New York, you walk out of your unit and you look up or down and see gardens up in the air,'' Karp said. There are exceptions to the trend. Projects along Biscayne Bay or the Miami River are required to set aside land for public waterfront walkways, and most thus satisfy or exceed basic open-space requirements at ground level. Others, while elevating most of their open space, provide substantially more than required. The Four Seasons, for instance, has more than 107,000 square feet of open space, or roughly three times the requirement, according to plans filed with the city. POOL ACCESS LIMITED Perhaps most controversially, the already approved Island Gardens project, a massive hotel and luxury-yacht marina on public parkland on Watson Island, will put required public spaces atop a parking garage -- but the public won't have access to an adjacent swimming pool. ''That's their idea of public open space,'' complained Nancy Liebman, president of the Urban Environment Leaque, which unsuccessfully challenged the plan. 'When we met with the developers, we asked, `Does that mean anybody can go in the pool?' No, of course not.'' Making developers put the open space at grade isn't always desirable, said Otto Boudet-Murias, the city's chief of planning and economic development. Plazas or other small urban open spaces around buildings are often unused, and 1980s-vintage condo towers along Brickell have lots of open space around them, but the general public can't use it and buildings are isolated from the street, doing nothing to enliven the neighborhood, he said. Pooling money to buy larger, well-designed and accessible open spaces will work better in the end, Boudet-Murias and Winton said. ''We can buy land and have a bigger chunk of it, and create green space along our major corridors that is truly usable,'' Winton said. | 
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