Anna is an environmental and land use attorney with Dean Mead law firm in Florida. She has over 30 years of experience working on both sides of the fence – for local government and currently in private practice. In this episode of In Our Expert Opinion Real Estate Podcast, Anna sits down with Tyler Davis to discuss land use and zoning as it relates to securing entitlements, environmental considerations, affordable housing, and some of the common challenges faced with land development.
The episode provides several best practices for landowners, developers, and real estate professionals seeking to understand the intricate balance between land development and environmental law.
Below is an excerpt from the interview. Listen above for the full podcast.
Anna Long, envrionmental attorney with Dean Mead
When should you hire a land use attorney? It depends on what your landowner expects from the deal time-wise, cost-wise, et cetera. It also depends on how savvy your landowner is; getting entitlements is not always an easy process. A combination of those things would then result in, “Let's wait,” or “Let's do something now, and let's see what we can get going”.
Properties that are entitled are generally, not always, higher-valued properties, but then the question becomes, “What if I'm getting it entitled for a residential subdivision, and the only person that's interested in it wants to put a warehouse there? Have I entitled it incorrectly?” So again, it depends. It depends on how much information the buyer has, what's going on around the properties, and the timing expectation for change.
You want to put together a really good team. You want to make sure that it's not just a land use attorney that you're involving, you want to involve a good engineering firm–certainly one that has a planning aspect to it. Having that type of group together to walk it through and to provide sufficient information to the jurisdiction for them to look for a way to get on board with your ask is certainly the best approach when you're doing something like this.
What are the biggest challenges through the entitlement process? I think the biggest hurdle is the community buy-in. Oftentimes with agricultural land, it's rural in nature. The folks that live in and around the property, they've gotten used to the greenery. They've gotten used to the rural lifestyle. They've gotten used to the semi-improved roads. They've gotten used to quiet. They've gotten used to no traffic. If you're going to turn what was fields into a 350-unit subdivision, that will change things and they are most often the greatest impediment to any sort of land use change.
In this episode on In Our Expert Opinion Real Estate Podcast, Tyler Davis, President of Saunders Ralston Dantzler Real Estate, sits down with Anna Long, environmental attorney with Dean Mead, to discuss securing entitlements and related land use topics.
How can you increase buy-in for development projects? I don't think you will ever get 100% buy-in, and there will always be a group that doesn't want to see change. The best you can do is work very closely with staff. If you're working with staff, and they look really concerned about every sentence you're speaking, that would be a problem to start with.
Definitely a good relationship with the staff, an understanding of what specific district within a particular jurisdiction the property lies, and is that commissioner or council person pro-development, not pro-development? You need to know those kinds of things; you need to do your homework.
Affordable housing. Somebody should look at the available inventory of existing housing, in particular multifamily that isn't the brand new stuff, because, that's part of the problem. If I have a choice between the brand new stuff and the old stuff, what am I going to choose if I could afford both? I’m going to choose the new stuff.
A lot of times, local government will say, “We don't need any more multifamily housing, we have plenty of apartments.” Well, a majority of the apartments that they're speaking of are not the apartments that people are looking for. So look for a program wherein it would make sense for the current owner of those properties to get either low-interest loans or something to support having those renovations, thus increasing their value and desirability, instead of looking at, “Where's a new place I could build?”