Gulf Pines Homes for Sale

Living in Gulf Pines

Gulf Pines is governed by one of the most specific pieces of land use writing on this coast, and the reason sits in the record. When residents began the county's neighborhood planning process in 2008, the plan they produced names what worried them: a reunion house, which it defines as a relatively large structure used almost exclusively for vacation rental to groups of ten or more, and which the neighborhood considered incompatible with the community because of its size and the traffic, noise and trash it generated. Of seventy ballots mailed to owners in December 2008, sixty-six came back in favor of pursuing a plan. Walton County adopted the result into Chapter 8 of its Land Development Code. The standards answer that worry in numbers rather than adjectives. A residence may hold no more than six bedrooms. It may not exceed 6,000 square feet of heated and cooled area, and it must reach at least 1,700 square feet once carports, patios, porches and garages are set aside. Height stops at four stories or 50 feet, whichever is less. No more than six cars may stay overnight on a parcel, and none overnight in a right-of-way or a common area. Nothing multi-family may be built and no non-residential use is allowed, with bed and breakfasts called out by name. The setback schedule works the same way, holding a house 20 feet off the front line and 10 off each side, which on lots this size is what stops a six-bedroom footprint from reaching the property line even when it stays under the area cap. Corner parcels give up half of that side margin, seven and a half feet, while the rear line holds at fifteen. Lot geometry is frozen in the same direction: existing lots may be merged, but the plat may not be cut into more of them, so the overlay caps what one house may be without ever letting the answer become more houses. No animals other than household pets may be kept. Two things this neighborhood is often described as having, it does not. The roads are not sand: the adopted plan states that every road inside Gulf Pines is a county-owned paved roadway, without curb and gutter or sidewalks, which is probably where the impression of an unimproved lane comes from. And the plat is not purely residential. Twenty lots along US Highway 98 in the original recording were all developed commercially, and the overlay's boundary deliberately excludes them, which is why the county roll still carries stores and an office on West US Highway 98 under a Gulf Pines legal description while the code that governs the houses does not reach them. What the plan does record as common ground is two areas, both owned and maintained by Gulf Pines Associates, Inc.: Bruno Boettcher Park, set along the roughly three acre Morrison Lake near the middle of the plat, with picnic tables, and a common beach access with a boardwalk and gazebo that the plan calls the Gulf Pines Taj Mahal. The subdivision runs from the highway down to the Gulf, bordered north and west by Sandestin and east by Hidden Dunes, and that long reach toward the water is also why one flood answer will not cover it. Read against the parcel outlines rather than at a sample point, the federal flood layer puts special flood hazard ground on the twelve parcels along Beach Drive and on none of the others. On every one of those twelve the larger share of that ground is a velocity zone, the coastal high hazard category mapped where wave action is expected, at a base flood elevation of 11 feet, with 12 feet reaching one lot and an AE band at 10 feet lying behind it. Not one of the twelve sits wholly inside the hazard area: the boundary crosses each of them, so what governs a particular house depends on where the house sits on its own lot, and an elevation certificate rather than a map is what settles that. Behind that row the plat is outside the special flood hazard area, part of it in the area of minimal flood hazard and part in the 0.2 percent annual chance band. Florida's coastal construction control line for Walton County, adopted in 2009, runs through the same beachfront row, which is a separate state permitting threshold from the flood map and is worth establishing for any seaward lot before design work begins. One overlay governs every house on this plat, but neither the flood designation nor the control line travels with it, so here both are questions about where the lot sits between the highway and the sand rather than questions about the neighborhood.

• County code caps a home at six bedrooms
• Common beach access with boardwalk and gazebo
• Bruno Boettcher Park on Morrison Lake
• Lots around a third of an acre at the median