A modernized downtown Oviedo: What to expect, and when 

New retail shops and restaurants. Hotels. More residential units. Paid parking structures. All could be on their way to old downtown Oviedo in the coming years if the owners of a significant amount of land’s longtime plans are realized.

An updated vision for a revitalized historic downtown was presented to the city’s Local Planning Agency on Feb. 20 by David Axel, the representative for the Evans family, who owns about 28 acres of downtown property, and it showed a new look for Oviedo. Axel said city staff asked him to present the plan because they are working on updating the land development code.

“Folks have a tendency to appreciate the types of places they live,” Axel, who is also chairman of Oviedo’s Community Redevelopment Agency Board, said. “For most people in Oviedo, it’s suburbia. … Suburbia doesn’t pay the bills. You need a downtown core. Well, why have a downtown core that just generates some tax revenue? Why not have a downtown core that actually feels like a downtown?”

And while groundbreaking on any new downtown development is most likely years away, putting the idea forward and into the public eye early on could lessen big reactions when it does begin, Oviedo Mayor Megan Sladek said.

”I think it is wise to get the shock value or shock factor [out of the way], let people work through it now and wrap their brains around it,” Sladek said. “What is proposed does comply with the [Comprehensive Plan], and we are limited as a city and our ability to tell people, ‘we’ll, no, we don’t like it, we wish you’d just leave it how it is.’

”That’s not really a choice under Florida law, so I think given the legal realities, it’s a smart move to start pushing this information out there,” she said.

The idea to update what Axel is now calling the Water Tower District, first pitched in 2022, has been an Evans family hope for nearly half a century, he said. Redeveloping what has become an older downtown area would give Oviedo a more modern look and feel.

”The idea is to basically crank it up a notch in that downtown and create an economic driver and a location for the city,” Axel said. 

New ways to park

Creating that economic driver would not come without some concessions, though. The plan calls for structured and street parking, both of which could be paid. Parking garages and paid parking would be new additions to a city that currently has neither.

While the concept of a large concrete parking structure could cause some to cringe, Axel said they could use aesthetically pleasing methods to make them more “physically attractive.”

Any paid parking would most likely be done on private rather than city property, Sladek said, because the city does not see the long term cost benefits of paying for large structures, especially as ridesharing and eventually driverless cars become more popular. Sladek said the cost of a parking garage is about $30,000 per spot.

”The city’s not going to subsidize the parking,” she said. “I don’t think the city should even pay for the initial parking along the edges of roads that lead to this stuff.”

And while paid parking would be a new feature in Oviedo, Axel said it’s just putting the payment people are already making through shopping out in the open.

“Nobody knows what they’re [already] paying for parking,” Axel said. “Every time you go to the store, you’re paying for free parking. The rent somebody’s paying for a space is paying for free parking. So right now it is just a hidden expense as opposed to a direct expense.”

In addition to new parking structures, Axel proposed having back-in angled parking on the street, which he said would have a learning curve, since it would also be new to Oviedo.

The vision for downtown would include back-in angled parking (Rendering from David Axel)

”I am personally not a fan of the back-in angled parking,” LPA member Bruce Kavenagh said. “I’ve seen people back up, and backing into parking spots isn’t always the easiest for some people.”

Axel said that despite the concerns, the benefits of the parking include safety while getting out of the car to go to the sidewalks, especially with children, and putting items into the trunk from the sidewalk rather than the street.

What will be included

While the hope from the land owners is to have a variety of developments, including residential, mixed-use, commercial and restaurants built into the area, it would depend on what is actually needed and wanted.

”You can’t just suddenly build more restaurants if there’s no demand, or more hotel if there’s no demand, or more residential if there’s no demand,” Axel said. “It’s market driven, and the reality is suburbia in Oviedo will not go away. All the existing uses will not go away, so you have to do it within the framework of the existing area.”

The plan would not be to have residential built on top of commercial spaces, which can be seen in and near Oviedo on the Park, because it can create what Axel calls “government-forced blight,” due to the high-cost of rent leading to empty storefronts and apartments.

“[The owners are] not intending to develop large apartment complexes or things of that nature,” Axel said. “The idea is to create continuing local ownership.”

While the Evans family owns a large portion of the property in downtown, they are not the only owners. They will need to work with the city, county and state to coordinate how the development takes shape, since there are city, county and state roads and property. For example, the Evans family is working on obtaining unused Cross Seminole Trail land, Axel said.

The family’s hope, Axel said, is to include as much local retail as possible, but it won’t be easy as the area is updated.

”It would be desirable,” he said. “[But] you’ve got some uses that are valuable tenants that the family appreciates that aren’t probably going to be able to afford to stay, or might be the types of uses that are deemed by the new land development code or new comp plan as undesirable.”

It could come at the cost of some of the existing businesses, Axel said.

”You’ve got outdoor storage, you’ve got tractor repair, you have automotive repair. Those things aren’t the types of things you try to put in the downtown,” he said. “So does that mean that some of those businesses might not continue to exist? Of course it means that. Does that mean that that’s a desired outcome? No, but it’s just the fact of life.”

Taking its time

While there is a long road ahead — potentially a decade or more — before the vision is realized, the goal is to have Oviedo’s two major hubs, Oviedo on the Park and the historic downtown, be connected to encourage foot and other traffic between them.

”It makes it genuinely walkable and bikeable for a whole lot of people, for existing people, not to mention the people that they plan to put there,” Sladek said. “What makes a lot of sense is to have sort of activity centers and pockets where people don’t have to cross these big roads, and this solves that problem.”

The timeline for the project depends on a number of factors, including the current road and infrastructure construction being down around the downtown area, water and sewer infrastructure upgrades, the official land development code update and master land use plan approval, Axel said.

”Each parcel in each of those development pods has different issues that come into play, and it just remains to be seen as we proceed,” he said.

A years-long timeline is not unusual for a project of this magnitude.

“The first agreement that set the stage for what would become Oviedo on the Park was [in] 1998,” he said. “It is now 2024. It’s [still] not done.These things just take time.”. 

And about the potential for years of ongoing construction in the area, following the still-in-progress road work on and around County Road 419?

“It’s going to be kind of annoying,” said Sladek, who lives in a nearby neighborhood. “As long as the roads basically work, if there’s construction happening internal to parcels and things slowly coming online, I think it’s going to be a nice change.”