Palm Coast’s Town Center will finally get the kind of development that was meant to define it when it was conceived in 2003–a 17-acre project mixing commercial, retail and residential uses in a six-building complex totaling 233,000 square feet, called The Promenade at Town Center. It’ll be right in the center of it all: at the southwest corner of Bulldog Drive and Central Avenue, with 1,100 feet of frontage on Central–about three football fields’ length—and 350 feet on Bulldog.
The Promenade complex will include 204 apartments on floors two, three and four. The first floor will consist of 68,000 square feet of shops and other commercial uses. The buildings will be interspersed with walkways so people who park their cars in the more than 500 parking spaces sprawling behind the buildings and walk around.
The Palm Coast City Council approved the site plan for the project on Tuesday with more compliments and anticipation than questions. Building permits are already in process.
“This is the first true mixed use building after 20 years being envisioned by the Town Center DRI,” the development of regional impact, Senior Planner Phong Nguyen said. All other developments in Town Center have been apartment buildings without first-floor retail spaces, or single family homes, or stand-alone office or institutional buildings such as the City Centre building or City Hall.
“We’ve been actively trying to assist with some opportunities for filling the building,” City Chief of Staff Jason DeLorenzo said of the commercial space. “We’ve provided some contacts of some local restaurateurs that are growing in the community.”
The Promenade, Nguyen said, “will encourage the development of employment centers in close proximity in housing and transportation corridors to be convenient for residents and to improve our economic climate. This is crucial because the vision initially is to have mixed-use buildings surrounding our Central Park. So this will be the first and hopefully it will be a catalyst for others to come.”
The apartments will be relatively small and consist of studios, one- and two-bedroom options, with 45 studios of 501 square feet (the type of size Ikea is made for), only 22 two-bedroom apartments in the 1,000 square-foot range, 37 smaller two-bedroom apartments between 850 and 875 square feet, and 100 one-bedroom apartments, all but three of them of 655 square feet. The buildings’ height will be limited to 500 feet, even though height could have gone as high as 80 feet there.
“This adds a tremendous amount of diversity to our housing inventory,” Council member Nick Klufas said. “This is something that I think is actually going to be useful for the type of housing that we’re looking to provide. I know oftentimes, we talk about smaller townhouses and things like this, all the way up to 1,800 square foot, one bedroom places. This is something that I think a lot of people are looking for, and I’m happy that it’s coming to Palm Coast.”
The project will not impact any wetlands. It will add significant traffic: about 6,000 additional daily vehicle trips, including 201 additional peak-hour morning trips and 242 peak-hour evening trips. The “study,” as the city called it, was an extrapolation based on the number of apartments and commercial space to be built. Traffic will leave an “acceptable” level of service along Town Center’s roads.
The developer goes by the name of PC Town Center Development II, a company that registered with the Division of Corporations last November, registered under William P. Angrick of Flagler Beach and the Tallahassee-based Corporation Service Company, itself registered as a foreign corporation based in Wilmington, Del., whose registered agent in Tallahassee is the Prentice-Hall Corporation (see their directors here.) The developer bought the two parcels adding up to 17 acres in December 2022 and November 2023, for a combined $2.9 million.
The company is tied to Persimmon Capital Partners, whose representative, Frankl Mendola, presented the project to the council. “We’re th guys developing and the owners of this project,” Mendola said. He listed himself, Angrick and Tom Glatzel as principals in the project. Mendola said the project is attracting interest from developers on parcels across the street.
“This building is unique in the sense that it is not your typical wood frame structure going up,” Mendola said, showing a sample of what he was describing. “This is what they call an insulated concrete form. This is what you fill in the center, this area right here, with concrete and the rebar snaps inside this portion of the form.” He showed two parallel white panels attached in the middle by metallic-looking joints. One side, the exterior, could be stucco, and the other side, the interior, would be drywall. “So this is the actual type of structure and it’s a concrete building, it is not a stick-built building.” He described it as twice as strong as concrete blocks and hurricane-resistant.
“It’s waterproof, it’s bulletproof and it’s fireproof,” he said. “This is a product that’s going to be lasting here for many decades ahead of us and it’s something that insurance companies here in Florida love.” It will also eliminate water-intrusion issues that could happen with block construction. But it will be a building 5 to 8 percent more expensive than the “stick” kind.
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