9-month moratorium on new self-storage facilities in Cape Coral

The Cape Coral City Council says the city has too many self-storage facilities and is imposing a nine-month moratorium on accepting applications and giving permits for new ones.

Storage units account for 11% of commercial space in Cape Coral, and now city leaders are taking a step back to see how to regulate new ones. While such facilities are convenient for tucking away items you don’t use, they are also gobbling up commercial space.

Cape Coral has almost 1.5 million square feet dedicated to existing self-storage facilities, and developers have plans to double that. That’s close to 700 acres of commercial space just in storage facilities, the equivalent of 17 Edison Malls, including the parking lots that surround them.

A nine-month moratorium will give city leaders the time to look at the best places they should be located so the landscape of Cape Coral doesn’t start to look like a storage facility city.

WINK News spoke to Scott Moore, a developer who recently spent more than $800,000 on property because of the demand for storage units.

“We bought this property for roughly $870,000 in January,” Moore said. “Immediately went under contract with a construction company, give them a $1 million deposit and we’ve been proceeding through the process of securing a permit.”

Councilman Tom Hayden recognizes the demand because Cape Coral is growing fast, but he believes prime commercial space can be managed better.

“We got to find out, OK, what are the right corridors?” Hayden said. “What are the right spaces? Where should they go?”

The applications that are already being processed will go forward. However, no new applications will be accepted or processed until at least January 2024.

“We just want to make sure we’re putting them in the right places,” Hayden said. ‘We don’t want to give up our prime commercial frontage on the main corridors, where we know the businesses that, you know, we really want to bring here should be.”

“Just doesn’t seem fair with the amount of money that we’ve spent, the time, the manpower,” Moore said.