The greater Estero area is running low on land available for development, prompting community leaders and residents to evaluate Estero’s future and the effects of continued growth.
Engage Estero, a nonprofit devoted to informing residents of community issues and encouraging engagement, held a public forum at FGCU last week. Moderated by the college’s own Shelton Weeks, professor of economics and finance, four expert panelists addressed the impacts of urbanization on the village and surrounding area.
“To say that growth is coming would be a misnomer,” Estero City Manager Steve Sarkozy said. “It’s already here.”
The Village of Estero comprises about 16,250 acres, or 25.4 square miles. But only 170 acres remain open for development.
Sarkozy, a panelist, said that maxing out the remaining plots in the village designated for housing would provide, at most, another 4,000 units.
One of the remaining parcels of property was approved for 26,000 housing units on east Corkscrew, 19,000 of which have yet to be built. On Three Oaks Parkway north of Estero Parkway, 5,000 units have been built in the last five years. Another 3,000 units will be going up.
“We’re looking at ways, for the remaining land that’s available, to do smart development that gives us density and a mix of uses so that you don’t have to drive a great distance to access the entertainment, the social things, the recreational stuff that we need as a community,” he said.
The village owns 62.5 acres at the corner of Corkscrew and U.S. 41, which he said is one of the best commercial development sites in the region. Estero deemed 30 acres of it as preservation land. There is another 10-acre preserve surrounding Estero River off Broadway Avenue East. In addition the village is working with the school district on preserving much of the 72 acres it owns along Three Oaks Parkway.
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Sarkozy said Estero lacks recreation that promotes healthy lifestyles, like linear parks. He added that Estero Parkway, which has extra wide sidewalks set far back from the road, is the template for every major street in the village.
Estero resident Ed Nowak, who lives in the private community Pelican Sound, told the panelists that the village has a daunting challenge when it comes to getting all the gated communities on board with a greater walkway system. Nowak said most communities have their own amenities already. About 80% of Estero residents live in private communities.
“They tend to be insular and self-centered, us included,” Nowak said. He attended the forum with his neighbor.
The 67-year-old has lived in Estero for 21 years. He said the panelists gave him renewed confidence in the village’s vision, although there still are challenges ahead – like sewage capacity and the need for expansion.
“The 19,000 projected units down Corkscrew and the thousands of apartments that have gone up already, they all have a toilet,” he said.
Panelist Daniel DeLisi is a water and environmental policy consultant. He served on the Estero Community Planning Panel prior to the village's incorporation in December 2014.
DeLisi said developers are required to plan sites in a way that they take on the same amount of water after construction as they did before development. The same goes for water discharge.
But the water-quality systems in the state have not effectively removed nitrogen from sewage treatment. DeLisi assured people that the state is creating standards and systems for more efficient reduction.
Marc Goldstein, also a Pelican Sound resident, expressed the same thoughts about the residential developments along Corkscrew.
“My concern is that we have these 26,000 homes that were approved in unincorporated Lee County to the east of us,” he said. “And all that – what’s the word? It’s a four-letter word – stuff flows downhill into the Estero Basin, into the Estero River, which passes by my house.”
He said he is concerned that the Village of Estero will have to deal with the consequences of the new developments, which the Lee County commissioners approved.
“I think it's a case of the county not taking into consideration the areas adjoining the unincorporated portions of the county,” he said in an interview. “I personally think that our county commissioners just want to see growth, growth at any cost.”
Another issue panelist DeLisi addressed is traffic. He said Estero has a weak roadway network.
“If we continue to look at Estero with the same lens that we looked at it [with] 20 years ago, as a very suburban community, your expectation on how traffic moves through this area is going to have to change,” he said. “It’s going to get worse.”
I-75 and US 41 are the only north-to-south roads that connect Fort Myers and Naples, making Estero a choke point.
George Burney attended the forum to see what the panel had to say about traffic once the new towers are built in Infinity at The Colony and the Ritz-Carlton Residences, both located off Coconut Road. Burney lives north of a community in Estero, but his neighborhood is considered part of Bonita Springs.
“So now we have [four] 20-something-story buildings, and we've got this two-lane road that's already a raceway,” Burney said.
His other concern is that the impact fees go to Bonita Springs while Estero, which owns much of Coconut Road, is left dealing with the consequences of the population growth.
“The demographics of the people that are going to be going into this neighborhood that are paying $4 million for a condo at the Ritz-Carlton, they're not going to be too happy when…the road is congested and it doesn't look as nice as the rest of Estero,” he said.
Prices at the Ritz-Carlton start at just over $3 million. “And they're going to pay the tax for it,” Burney said. “And all that money is going to go south, and none of it's going to come into their neighborhood where they live.”
Sarkozy agreed that Coconut Road is going to be what he called a mess.
“The development at the end is being done in what is the city of Bonita Springs,” he said. “They’ve approved all of that development, expecting that the village is going to, I guess, upgrade Coconut to satisfy them.”
Creative and adaptive reuse of infrastructure is another topic covered by the panel members. Jim Wallace, who served on the Estero Planning, Zoning and Design Board and is a managing partner of Genova Realty, said repurposing commercial space into residential space is inevitable, natural and evolutionary.
“All the growth over the last 20 years is because people wanted to live north of Naples and south of Fort Myers,” he said. “But the reality of it is that your home or most of your homes are really repurposed farmland and cattle ranch if we go back to the beginning.”
He said people want less brick-and-mortar retail since Amazon transformed the way people shop and iPhones changed the way people communicate and work.
“More Barnes and Nobles will downsize,” he said. “More Ruby Tuesdays will become Wawas. And, yes, 60-year-old RV and mobile home parks now worth $600,000-plus an acre or abandoned Sweet Bay supermarkets may be replaced by condominiums.”
Wallace said that too many developments in Estero are not desirable destinations. He disagrees with the amount of land the village wants to preserve amid the growth.
“The planet loves you,” he said. “But you don’t have to exclude humans from that process. They can be interactive.”
“Why are we preserving uplands when those places can be areas where people can be staged to experience the green space?” Wallace said. “Why can’t we take people up into the canopies and let them actually see some of those beautiful, magnificent oaks that are there?”
Wallace believes integrating mixed-use, turning Estero into a desired destination and increasing interactive green space will make the village’s growth healthy.
“If designed right, higher density can produce lower intensity, less traffic, less visual pollution and more green space,” he said. “So put your personal aversions aside. What’s good for the village ends up being good for the people.”
Real estate broker Ross McIntosh touched on beneficial strategies for mixed-use developments — where commercial, residential and other uses are blended into one space. He said Coconut Point is the best example of a surviving mixed-use project.
But even Coconut Point has its challenges, particularly with its residential units. “The apartments that are over stores are paying commercial rates for their trash chutes,” he said. “If you’re over the store, you don’t have under-building parking.”
His ideal community is Estero Parc, west of Estero Parkway and US 41, because the apartments are located behind a grocery store and restaurants. The commercial uses are not mixed in with the apartments, and the commercial buildings are on the main road. He said this design provides a sound barrier to the residents and achieves the same goals as mixed-use.
“But I think we need to be careful about asserting that mixed-use is the wave of the future when we really don’t have that many examples of actually pulling it off,” he said.
The next Engage Estero meeting is on Wednesday, Nov. 15 at 6 p.m. at the Estero Park and Recreation Center.
This story was reported and written for the Democracy Watch program, a collaboration between FGCU Journalism and WGCU News. Gwendolyn Salata can be reached at gwendolyn.salata@yahoo.com.
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