Waterleigh apartments coming to Horizon West

HORIZON WEST  Horizon West’s Village H is set to expand again with a proposed request to build the first phase of apartments in the Waterleigh planned development.

Situated between Avalon Road and State Road 429, just south of Seidel Road, applicant VHB, Inc. plans to build 252 multi-family residential units as part of the overall Waterleigh development.

There are already 3,600 new homes in the Waterleigh community, situated on more than 1,400 acres and focused on a lakefront lifestyle. The new apartments are another piece of the development plan, with much of Village H being part of the Waterleigh neighborhood. The other two properties, Springhill and the Zanzibar property, complete the village, which is bordered on the west by Lake County.

“(These are) market-grade apartments,” said applicant John Prowell of VHB, a planning and engineering firm. “They’re not affordable housing or a niche for senior housing, it’s market grade. It’s a quality project here. It won’t be gated or anything like that.”

The proposed apartments are three-story buildings. They are allowed under code to be up to five stories, but Prowell assured community members that they will only be three stories.

In the past, there were concerns brought up regarding stormwater drainage and runoff, since Hickory Nut Lake — considered the “crown jewel” of the project — is nearby. The water will run in two different places when it rains: down to a typical stormwater pond, and through an underground pipe that runs across Avalon Road and empties into a wetland.

One resident at the meeting asked about the possibility of doing Type A drainage, which is when all runoff from the backyard to the front drains forward into the streets and the stormwater ponds.

However, a lot of the time lakefront properties have a high elevation and the land flows down toward the lake so it isn’t possible to have Type A drainage without a sort of wall being constructed to mitigate the backward flow.

“We usually try to get as much forward as we can and everything that goes to the backyard is captured in a dry environmental swell,” Prowell said. “I can’t tell you there would be A-graded drainage all around the lot because it wouldn’t be practical.”

Another concern was the impact the new development will have on nearby schools. Prowell said that this is taken care of by the developer paying the required school impact fees, which help mitigate the cost of development and land use on the school system. 

Additionally, the overall plan for Village H, once complete, includes an elementary school, a middle school and a high school.

Since the village has already been zoned as planned development (PD), construction can begin as soon as all required permits are received. Prowell said they hope to break ground on the project by early 2017, and the apartments could be complete by the year after.

For more information on the project, contact Orange County Case Planner Tammilea Chami at (407) 836-5943 or at [email protected].

Contact Danielle Hendrix at [email protected].