Pinellas staff urges caution as Florida’s Live Local law widens build-by-right areas

Pinellas County planning staff on Oct. 16 advised commissioners to resist local adoption of two optional expansions to Florida’s Live Local framework after outlining three years of state changes that have broadened where affordable housing may be built by right.

Michael Schroederbach, of Pinellas County Building Development Review Services, told the commission the original Live Local legislation (Senate Bill 102, effective July 1, 2023) preempted local zoning on many commercial, industrial and mixed‑use parcels for multifamily affordable housing if at least 40% of the units are affordable at 120% of area median income or below. Two later bills (Senate Bill 328, 2024 and Senate Bill 1730, 2025) expanded and clarified allowable density, floor‑area‑ratio (FAR), maximum building height and administrative review procedures.

Schroederbach summarized the current state limits: maximum density up to 150 units per acre in applicable zones; a maximum FAR of 7.5 (and inclusion of lot coverage in that calculation); maximum height measured against the tallest allowed building within a one‑mile radius or three stories, whichever is higher; and a mandatory 15% parking reduction if a project is within a quarter‑mile of public transit or has available off‑site parking within 600 feet. He also noted the law clarifies only the affordable units must be rental units while market‑rate units may be owner‑occupied.

Why it matters: the state changes increasingly limit local discretion over scale and siting of multifamily affordable projects, staff said. Schroederbach showed maps indicating how the eligible parcel pool grew between 2023 and 2025 after statutory definitions expanded to include office, institutional and flexible zoning districts. “This expanded the amount of areas that are opened up now for Live Local projects,” he said.

Two optional provisions in the 2025 bill drew the most commissioner attention. One would let a Live Local applicant include an adjacent parcel of land in a proposed multifamily development regardless of the adjacent parcel’s zoning. The other would permit Live Local projects on parcels owned by religious institutions (with the statute requiring only 10% of units on those parcels be affordable). County staff recommended against adopting either option, saying they would bypass the county’s standard land‑use and zoning review and could allow projects that do not fit neighborhood character.

Commissioner input and staff recommendation: Commissioners traded questions about how the state‑defined one‑mile height radius and the new protections for single‑family adjacency (which permit local height limits when a project is adjacent on two or more sides to a subdivision of at least 25 single‑family homes) would work in practice. Several commissioners expressed interest in retaining as much local discretion as allowed — framing the optional provisions as a “may” and saying the board should decline the optional expansion where possible.

Schroederbach and county counsel told commissioners that, under advice from the county attorney’s office, the county must adopt such optional provisions broadly or not at all (i.e., the county cannot approve them on a case‑by‑case basis). That constraint reinforced staff’s recommendation to decline both optional items and to require applicants who want to pursue developments on adjacent lots or religious parcels to go through the ordinary local land‑use process.

Staff also cautioned that although statutory preemptions set high theoretical maximums for units, FAR and height, practical constraints — stormwater, landscape, floodplain, transportation impacts and open‑space requirements — frequently reduce achievable scale in real projects.

What comes next: commissioners expressed interest in community outreach and visual examples showing how the new allowances could affect places such as neighborhood commercial nodes along U.S. 19 and interior locations like Ozona, and asked staff to provide acreage counts for the newly eligible parcels. For now the board indicated support for staff’s recommendation not to adopt the two optional expansions to Live Local.