St. Lucie’s Board of County Commissioners, in their last meeting of the year, approved the rezoning of more agricultural land in the push to house more workers within the county and shorten commutes.
The board unanimously rezoned a 19.75-acre plat along Angle Road to house five dwelling units per acre Dec. 9. The land, 6465 Angle Road between Taylor Dairy and Keen roads, would likely be home to workers in the unincorporated county.
These lots would fit zoning requirements of at least 8,000 square feet and a minimum width of 75 feet, according to Leah Heinzelmann, a landscape architect with Cotleur & Hearing of Jupiter. Features of the plat included “an older single-family residence and pasture land heavily impacted by” invasive pepper trees, she added in a presentation.
The land joins several properties in the rural county both east and west of Kings Highway, including the 202.2-acre Pineapple Grove and 391.26-acre Eagle Bend. These and others now sync with road improvement schematics planned until 2045, county records show.
Eagle Bend, whose buildout was first proposed in 2014, will house a potential maximum of 1,713 dwellings upon the completion of a five-phase construction cycle.
The Taylor Dairy/Angle plat lies on roadways “no longer consistent with the comprehensive plan” given the objective to “remediate the need for further sprawl,” Heinzelmann said.
Worker retention and population growth remained in the conversation when county senior planner Irene Szedlmayer, AICP, presented her division’s studies on the dais.
Housing at the newly zoned plat may foster “substantial jobs in the area,” said Szedlmayer. She added much of the work comes from facilities still recovering from tornadoes generated by Hurricane Milton over a year ago: the Kings Highway Industrial Park, the Southern Truss Company, and the Treasure Coast International Airport.
Garnering more work with steadier traffic in the rural county correlates with further population growth forecasts. According to projections Szedlmayer presented, St. Lucie took in an estimated 107,957 new residents between 2020 and 2024. This compares to the 179,055 new residents who moved here between 1990 and 2020.
Housing developments in unincorporated St. Lucie, such as the Taylor Dairy/Angle plat, go forward with population predictions of 423,900 by 2030; 494,200 by 2040; and 567,700 by 2050, county projections also show.
These projections “don’t necessitate the rezoning of this particular parcel, but it does lend support for the need to increase the housing supply” over the next 25 years, Szedlmayer said.
That job market in the sector, however, “hasn’t been as robust as it may have been anticipated,” Szedlmayer added. “I think it’s still coming but that’s what everyone’s wondering.”
Nick Shroth, a local real estate broker and owner of the plat through a shell corporation, shared his concerns about keeping the job market in St. Lucie. He related the situation of Islamorada Beer Company employees at their 50,000-square-foot brewery/manufacturing facility in the Treasure Coast International Airport starting about a decade ago.
“When the Beer Company was a little more bustling and we had 100 employees, or so, working there,” Shroth said, “a lot of them lived in Vero (Beach, and not) in the immediate area here.”
Longer commutes between counties for workers going to Islamorada and other rural industrial offices sprouted from a “dearth” of “new housing, good housing” for St. Lucie, Shroth said.
He added: “There are options. None of them are great.”
Shroth plans to shape the new Angle Road plat into a “residential rental community” intended to “fill that void,” he said. “We started with (a) nine-unit-per-acre concept; that came out to 170 units and – maybe my eyes were a bit too big for my stomach – we kind of dialed that back.”
That reduction also coexists with the greater capacity of Eagle Bend nearby. “I’ve been part of the Eagle Bend project for five or so years,” Shroth said. “There is a substantial part of road infrastructure that is a part of that.”
The board took no public comment unlike a string of other agricultural-to-residential redevelopments throughout 2025, many of which saw significant criticism from residents. The county did not reply to a request for comment on the Angle Road plat by press time.