The Mark at CityScape contains 208 residential units, 18,052 square feet of retail space and a 686-space garage.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Mary Hladky
Many downtown Boca Raton residents have watched intently as The Mark at CityScape, a mix of retail, offices and 208 apartments, rose from the ground at the southeast corner of Federal Highway and Palmetto Park Road.
The project was the first approved under the interim design guidelines implemented in 2008 that allow buildings 40 feet taller than the 120-foot limit in much of downtown — provided they are aesthetically pleasing.
Now The Mark is completed, and residents can judge for themselves whether the new guidelines worked as intended. At an April 30 meeting to assess the results, the verdict rendered by many residents asking to speak was that they failed and the guidelines should be overhauled or tossed.
“The IDG doesn’t require bad taste … but it is producing that because of loopholes,” said Antonia Gore, a member of BocaBeautiful.org, which wants to maintain a beautiful downtown. “The IDG are producing massive, bulky buildings. I think all of this should be reevaluated, if not scrapped.”
Mayor Susan Haynie, listening in the audience, offered her own judgment during a break in the meeting. “If the IDG are yielding buildings like The Mark, they are not doing the job and we need to assess that,” she said. “We will have to roll up our sleeves and figure this out.”
Downtown building heights have long been limited to 100 feet, or nine stories, plus an additional 20 feet for architectural elements. But residents complained of monolithic and unattractive buildings going up, even though they did not exceed the allowable height.
The city brought in Urban Design Associates as a consultant to do a design overhaul after talking with residents. Its guidelines allowed developers to build taller provided their plans included pedestrian-oriented streets, public spaces and landscaping, as well as building setbacks and a varied skyline.
But when the Great Recession hit, downtown development ground to a halt. The guidelines didn’t get a test until the economy improved and developers rushed forward with building plans.
The Mark was the first out of the gate, but the city has since approved three other projects even though the The Mark wasn’t completed. Those approvals were roundly criticized by activists who want to preserve the city’s low-rise look. They have been pressing city officials for months to evaluate The Mark before approving any more taller projects.
That finally happened on April 30, when UDA made a presentation to members of the Planning and Zoning Board, the Community Appearance Board and Downtown Boca Raton Advisory Committee, who asked questions and offered opinions about how the guidelines might be changed. Members of the public were given three minutes each to comment.
In his evaluation of The Mark, Eric Osth, managing principal of UDA, acknowledged some problems with how the project turned out. Tinted windows in the ground-floor retail space keep people from looking into the shops, windows on two sides of the project are too small and sidewalks are not pedestrian-friendly. The use of varying paint colors on the exterior would make the project look better and less massive, he said.
But overall, “The Mark is doing what we asked for,” Osth said.
Summing up Osth’s evaluation during a break in the meeting, Deputy City Manager George Brown said, “There are things they learned from it, but it is a good project.”
Residents speaking at the meeting disagreed.
“We don’t like The Mark,” said John Gore, Antonia’s husband and president of BocaBeautiful.org. “We think it looks like a prison.”
UDA’s assessment of The Mark “made me feel like I was in an alternative universe,” said Andrea O’Rourke, chair of the Federation of Boca Raton Homeowner Associations.
Ann Witte, a financial and economic consultant who is a board member of the watchdog website BocaWatch, said the IDG are so complicated that the city is not able to implement them, and urged UDA and city officials not to make them even more complicated.
“Complicated regulations never work,” she said. “They are gamed by the people who are being regulated.”
UDA now will take what it heard and make recommendations to the City Council, sitting as the Community Redevelopment Agency board, on what changes, if any, should be made. Public hearings will be held before any changes are implemented, Brown said.
How quickly that will happen is unclear. Osth said UDA could do its work quickly, but did not specify how long it would take.
Haynie said that if UDA’s report is ready this summer when many residents will be out of town, she would want to hold off until the fall.
But the meeting highlighted for her some problems separate from whether the guidelines make for more attractive buildings.
She said UDA’s vision for The Mark was not communicated adequately to the Community Appearance Board, which could have objected to the window tinting, paint color and sidewalk design.
“Something didn’t work,” she said. “What was revealed is that it was a process issue, a disconnect between the UDA and CAB.”
One benefit of the meeting was having members of three city committees that have a say in downtown development in the same room so that they better understand their respective roles in making sure that plans approved by the city translate into what is actually built, she said.
Derek Vander Ploeg, an architect who is a member of two of the committees, noted the same problem in his comments to Osth.
“There appears to be a breakdown … between what is approved and what is finally built,” he said. “The collective ‘we’ should get better at this.”
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