Local Government

Pensacola’s Land Development Code Rewrite Heads to City Council

City staff and its consultant, Inspire Placemaking Collective, previewed the first comprehensive overhaul of the city’s developmentrulebook in decades. Here’s what changes for homeowners, builders, and neighborhoods.

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City staff and Inspire have spent nearly two years rewriting Pensacola’s Land Development Code walked. They walked reporters through the changes Monday morning, previewing what will be a first-reading vote before City Council this Thursday.

Let’s Be Real: Land development codes are not exciting. They’re the dense, cross-referenced rulebooks that tell you how tall your fence can be, how many parking spaces a coffee shop needs, and how far your new garage has to sit from the property line. Most residents will never open one.

• But that rulebook shapes almost everything about how Pensacola actually gets built—what kinds of housing are legal in your neighborhood, whether a developer can flood your backyard, how many trees come down for a new subdivision, and how long it takes to get a permit. When the code is confusing or contradictory, the people who pay for it are homeowners, small builders, and neighbors stuck fighting over gray areas at the Architectural Review Board. That’s why this update.

City Director of Developmental Services Sherry Morris opened the briefing by noting Pensacola’s code dates to a 1947 framework, with a major rewrite in 1965, and hasn’t had a comprehensive overhaul since. Cynthia Cannon, the city’s Planning and Zoning Division Manager, led the project alongside Patricia Tyjeski of Inspire Placemaking. Tyjeski walked us through the presentation this morning.

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Two Years, Hundreds of Fixes

The project began with a technical review of the existing code—how it was organized, what was outdated, what conflicted with itself—before moving into drafting.

Staff identified 268 problems in that first phase. Once the process opened to the public, the planning board, and City Council, that list grew to roughly 750 items, all tracked in a public matrix on the project website.

• Kickoff meeting: December 2024
• Three public drafts, each with community input sessions
• Planning board hearing: July 14
• Council first reading: this Thursday
• Council second and final reading: September 24

Not everything staff originally proposed survived. State lawmakers passed Senate Bill 180 in the middle of the process, barring cities from adopting land-use rules more burdensome than what already exists.

• That killed plans to expand bicycle parking requirements citywide and forced the city to convert several mandatory design standards—for facades, civic buildings, auto-oriented uses—from “shall” to “should,” making them encouraged rather than required.

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What Changes

For Homeowners: The most tangible shift for everyday property owners involves stormwater. Single-family and duplex infill projects will now be required to submit a lot grading plan, closing a loophole where that requirement had quietly lapsed over the years. City officials said the change responds to a real problem: builders raising a new home’s elevation and pushing stormwater onto neighboring lots.

• The bottom line for builders: Planning & Zoning Manager Cynthia Cannon said the added requirement shouldn’t be cost-prohibitive, since a site survey is already required, and there’s no single fix mandated—swales, grading, and other drainage options are all acceptable, as long as water stays on-site.
• Reviews for a typical single-family home should still take two to three weeks, Morris said, though the back-and-forth over lot grading plans could add time depending on how quickly a developer responds to staff comments.

More Housing Options: The code also expands what’s called “missing middle” housing—duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes—in medium-density residential zones, raising the cap on multi-family and townhouse units from two and three, respectively, up to four.

• Officials stressed this doesn’t change overall residential density, which is still governed by acreage and lot size under the city’s comprehensive plan; it simply allows more housing types to fit within those same limits.
• New design standards will require those buildings to look like single-family homes rather than obvious townhouse rows.

Thank you, Florida Legislature (sarcasm): Following a new state mandate, manufactured and mobile homes built after a certain date must now be permitted anywhere a single-family home is allowed, with no separate design standards—a change Tyjeski said caught the planning board off guard when it first came up.

The tree fee increase, Cannon said, simply reflects what it actually costs the city to plant and maintain a replacement tree for two years after developers can’t preserve one on their own site.

• “We were actually losing money in the replanting of trees,” she said. “We’re just trying to make it whole at this point.”

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What’s Next

Residents can review a side-by-side “changes” document on the project website showing every deletion, addition, and relocation in the proposed code, alongside a clean copy of the full rewrite. City Council takes up the first reading Thursday, with a second and final vote scheduled for Sept. 24.