While many investors, developers and real estate professionals are looking the other way, an undiscovered neighborhood in South Walton County is quietly building momentum toward becoming the area’s next real estate “hot spot.” Have you been keeping an eye on South Walton’s Town Center I?

If you’re like many people, you’ve never even heard of this developing area. According to the county ordinance creating the Town Center, it is “intended to be a planned, mixed-use community that is, in essence, a new planned traditional town to be developed in South Walton according to the master development plan adopted for the area by the county.” Other planned traditional towns (a.k.a. Traditional Neighborhood Developments or TNDs as they’ve been dubbed by New Urbanists) in South Walton include Seaside, Rosemary Beach, Water Color and Gulf Place. The notion is to have a county established and nurtured “real” town in the new Town Center.The Town Center I includes the area along U.S. Highway 331 that is north of U.S. Highway 989 and south of Choctawhatchee Bay. The district currently includes the Walton County South Annex, the Walton County Chamber of Commerce, the Coastal Branch Library, the Walton County Sheriff’s Department and South Walton High School. The ceremonial ground-breaking for the South Walton Campus of Okaloosa-Walton College, also located in this district, has already been held. The Boys and Girls Club planned for the Town Center is still on the drawing board, but the location has been finalized on J.D. Miller Road on the western side of the district. Work on an eight-foot-wide, multi-use trail, being constructed by the county, is under way. More than a mile of trails will wind behind the South County Annex. The county is also considering a roughly 6-acre park in the district.It’s significant that obtaining any one of the above civic, educational and recreational uses would be considered a triumph for most any planned development. Imagine the critical mass of the collection in a designated Town Center. What the new Town Center currently lacks is residential housing and neighborhood scale commercial/retail. Recognizing this challenge, the Town Center I plan encourages development by offering developers additional density bonus points. Yes, you read that correctly: encourages development. Developers will receive points toward increased density for including in their projects elements such as: dedicated public parking, live/work units, public water fountain, wetland observation platform or benches, a transit stop with park and ride spaces, a “Green Building” (undefined), bicycle racks, multiple housing types, workforce housing, etc.Currently, pricing for available residential land in Town Center I is literally all over the map. Savvy buyers should quietly turn their attention to acquiring property in this district before the word gets out.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 2:37 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.