The Storage-vs-Walkable War in Real Time: Why Clermont's recovery of walkable-commercial land is harder than its prevention of new self-storage — and what the PUD layer reveals about which neighborhoods get the shops they were promised

The South Lake corridor has spent two years restricting future self-storage and is now in a harder phase: trying to recover the walkable-commercial promise that storage already absorbed inside already-entitled PUDs. Clermont moved storage from C-2 to M-1 by code amendment in January 2025 (4-2). That protects the next neighborhood. The Waterbrooke residents who showed up in November 2024 to defend the promised "Shops at Waterbrooke" did not save their own commercial fabric — Commissioners Colby and Grube cited PUD terms and approved the storage amendment 5-0 on the same agenda. The recovery phase is fought at the PUD-language layer, not the zoning-category layer. Where the original PUD merely permitted storage as a use, storage has won. Where the PUD required walkable commercial activation — Hills Town Center on Hancock Road in Minneola, anchored by Crooked Can Brewing's 42,000-square-foot food hall opening in 2026 — the developer has recruited the brewery. The brewery is not the cause of walkability. The PUD language is the cause.