850 SW 51st Way, Gainesville, FL 32607

Planned Development District

The purpose of the planned development PD district is to provide a particularized zoning district that recognizes unique conditions, allows design flexibility, and promotes planned diversification and integration of uses and structures, which other zoning districts cannot accommodate, while also retaining the city commission's authority to establish such limitations and regulations as it deems necessary to protect the public health, safety, and general welfare. The PD district is designed to: Encourage flexible land development that sustainably uses land and infrastructure, reduces transportation needs, conserves energy, and maximizes the preservation of natural resources.; Allow the integration of different land uses and densities in one development that would not otherwise be provided for in other zoning districts in this chapter, and which encourage compatibility in overall site design and scale both internal and external to the project site.; Permit outstanding and innovative residential and nonresidential developments with quality-of-life design features, such as an integration of housing types and accommodation of changing lifestyles within neighborhoods; design that encourages internal and external convenient and comfortable travel by foot, bicycle, and transit through such strategies as pedestrian scale, a building orientation generally toward streets and sidewalks, parking located to the side or rear of buildings, narrow streets, modest setbacks, front porches, connected streets, multiple connections to nearby land uses, terminated vistas, recessed garages, alleys, enhances landscaping, and mixed-uses.; Provide flexibility to meet changing needs, technologies, economics, and consumer preferences and allows for ingenuity and imagination in the planning and development of relatively large tracts.; Achieve overall coordinated building and facility relationships and infill development, and eliminate the negative impacts of unplanned and piecemeal development.