Pensacola planning board forwards East Side, Urban Core and West Side CRA plans to City Council

On April 8, 2025, the City of Pensacola Planning Board voted unanimously to find three updated Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) plans — East Side, Urban Core and West Side — consistent with the city’s comprehensive plan and to forward each plan to the City Council for final action.

The three plans, prepared with consultant Urban Design Associates, update long-standing redevelopment guidance and package “special demonstration projects” the consultant said would cluster investments to show how change could happen across land use, economic development, housing, transportation and open space. "We've been in this process now for over a year," Megan O'Hara, principal and partner at Urban Design Associates, told the board as she summarized the engagement, analysis and recommendations that underpin the plans.

The plans include city-scale and neighborhood-scale recommendations: updated design and form standards, potential changes to lot size and density to be explored through the land development code update, targeted economic development programming and expanded housing incentives and acquisition strategies. Demonstration projects cited in the East Side plan include renovating the Crystal Ice House Market into a food-and-arts incubator, launching an infill housing program, advancing an equitable-development…