What Does FAR Mean?

St. Petersburg regulates the size of buildings downtown by something called Floor/Area Ratio (FAR), which allows a building's maximum floor space to be some multiple of the size of the lot on which the building stands.

To look at some examples, consider a building lot that is 100 feet long and 100 feet wide. That lot would have an area of 10,000 square feet. If the allowed FAR on that lot was 2, then the maximum floor space in a building there would be 20,000 square feet (the lot size of 10,000 times the FAR of 2).

FAR does not dictate the specific shape of a building or a specific height. For example, if our example building covered the entire lot with no setbacks and no green space, then it could be just 2 stories tall. That's because each floor would use up 10,000 square feet of the allowed maximum of 20,000. But, if the building covered just half the lot, then each floor would have just 5,000 square feet, and so the building could be 4 stories tall (the allowed maximum of 20,000 divided by the 5,000 on each floor). Similarly, if the building covered just one quarter of the lot, it could be 8 stories tall.

Zoning codes often take this straightforward concept and complicate it in various ways. For example, in St. Petersburg, the code specifies a "base" FAR for all building lots downtown. Along Beach Drive, that base FAR is 2. This means that an FAR of 2 is just the starting point for somebody wanting to put up a building there. The code allows that FAR to be increased by various increments if a project incorporates certain features that the city wants to encourage. In the case of Beach Drive, the city wants to encourage residential use, so a "bonus" FAR of 1.5 can be added to the base of 2 for projects that are primarily residential. The code lists a variety of these bonuses, but also specifies a "maximum" FAR of 4.

So, on Beach Drive, there is a base FAR of 2, and various bonuses that can be tacked on until the maximum of 4 is reached.

A further complication is that some types of floor space aren't counted against FAR. One example would be that if a hotel has an atrium, then that doesn't count. By far the most significant of these cases is that parking garages don't count when a building's square footage is calculated. As far as regulating building size is concerned, parking garages just don't exist. In an earlier example, we showed that with an FAR of 2, a building that covered one quarter of a lot could go up to 8 stories tall. But let's say that that is an office building that needs lots of parking spaces. The result would likely be a 2-story tall parking garage that covers almost all of the lot, with the 8-story office building on top of that.

In the case of very large office buildings, parking structures may need to be 6 or 8 stories tall, covering an entire lot. Even then, the parking doesn't count towards FAR. It is only the building that sits on top of that structure that counts.

The base and maximum FARs in other parts of Downtown are more generous than along Beach Drive. In fact, apart from Beach Drive, the zoning codes under certain circumstances now allow "unlimited" FAR. This "unlimited" FAR can supposedly be achieved by piling up sufficient bonuses. However, in the more than 20 years that this provision has existed, only one developer has claimed to earn enough bonuses to qualify for "unlimited" FAR. That project never received final approval.