STEVE REID
Editor & Publisher
sreid@lbknews.com
If history is any guide, the Shore Restaurant’s new proposal for a three-story, mixed-use complex on St. Armands Circle is sailing into choppy waters.
While the renderings promise a chic, courtyard-style “lifestyle center” with a bodega and pool, the project is landing on a piece of real estate that has historically functioned as a graveyard for ambitious development. For the last five years, St. Armands Circle has been the site of a bitter, invisible war between commercial landlords who want to build “up” and a powerful bloc of residents who want to keep the Circle “low.”
To understand why a simple three-story building is a headline event, you have to look at the wreckage of the proposals that came before it.
The Fillmore Fiasco (2021)
The most spectacular failure in recent memory was the saga of the Fillmore Parking Lot.
In 2021, a development group floated a plan that seemed, on paper, like a slam dunk: a 98-room boutique hotel and a high-end grocery store to be built on the city-owned parking lot on Fillmore Drive. The developers argued it was exactly what the Circle needed to compete with Naples’ Fifth Avenue—a place for visitors to sleep and shop without creating traffic.
The backlash was immediate and visceral.
The St. Armands Residents Association (SARA), a well-organized group of homeowners who live on the quiet streets radiating off the commercial hub, mobilized with military efficiency. They argued that a hotel would turn their neighborhood into a 24-hour tourist trap and choke the already congested Ringling Causeway.
A survey conducted by the association was devastating: 75 percent of residents opposed the project. The opposition was so fierce that the City Commission, usually pro-development, got cold feet. The proposal died a public death in February 2022 when the commission voted 4-1 to halt any sale of the land, effectively killing the hotel.
The “Vision 2026” defeat
Undeterred, the St. Armands Business Improvement District (BID)—a coalition of commercial landlords—tried a different tactic later that year. They dubbed it “Vision 2026.”
Instead of a specific building, they asked the city to change the rules of the game. They petitioned for a “Zoning Text Amendment” that would raise the maximum building height on the Circle from 35 feet to 45 feet. Their argument was that the aging, single-story buildings from the 1950s were obsolete and that landlords needed the extra 10 feet to make renovations financially viable.
This, too, touched the “third rail.”
Residents saw the “extra 10 feet” as a Trojan Horse for density. They feared it would transform the quaint, European-style circle into a canyon of four-story condos.
• The Statistic: A staggering 90 percent of surveyed residents opposed the height increase.
• The Outcome: The Business Improvement District, realizing they were fighting a losing political battle, withdrew the height increase request in October 2022, admitting defeat to the homeowners.
The Leonard Factor
What makes the new Shore proposal so intriguing is the man behind it: Tom Leonard.
Leonard, the co-founder of Shore, was a key figure in that failed “Vision 2026” push. He has long argued that St. Armands is falling behind rival destinations like Tampa’s Hyde Park or West Palm Beach because it is frozen in amber by outdated zoning.
Now, Leonard is back, but with a different strategy.
• Private vs. Public: Unlike the Fillmore proposal, this project is on private land he controls, not public property, removing a key political hurdle.
• The “Mixed-Use” Needle: By proposing just eight residential units rather than a 98-room hotel, he appears to be trying to thread the needle—offering the “live-work-play” density landlords crave, but on a micro-scale that might not trigger the wrath of the Residents Association.
However, the “three-story” height is still a flashpoint. If the project requires a variance to exceed the strict 35-foot cap that residents fought so hard to protect in 2022, the Shore proposal could quickly turn from a architectural rendering into the next battleground for the soul of the Circle.
Next Steps: The Dec. 17 pre-application meeting will be the first test. City planners will reveal whether Leonard’s vision fits inside the existing box, or if he is asking the city to break the very rules that residents have spent half a decade defending.
