The Buildings on Waddell Street Never Needed a Permit. They Needed a Decision.

If you've walked or biked along Waddell Street in Casa Marina any time in the last two decades, you've passed the same four buildings. Boarded windows, chain-link fencing, the kind of quiet decay that becomes so familiar you stop registering it as strange. Most neighbors assume the holdup is bureaucratic: a permit stuck somewhere in a City Hall queue, a review board dragging its feet, the usual friction of building anything in a town where nearly every parcel change draws a hearing.

That assumption is wrong. According to the city's own planning staff, the company that owns those lots could have rebuilt them at any point in the last twenty years without asking anyone's permission. It never did, not because it couldn't, but because it was waiting on something else entirely. That distinction, more than the vote that eventually settled the fight, is what actually explains why those buildings still look the way they do.

Twenty Years of the Same Four Buildings

The structures sit behind Casa Marina Resort, facing Waddell Street but carrying Seminole Street addresses. They were built to house hotel employees, and they served that purpose until Hurricane Wilma flooded them in 2005. They have been empty since. Park Hotels & Resorts, the real estate investment trust that acquired the Casa Marina property in 2017, inherited a set of derelict buildings that predated its ownership by more than a decade.

None of that is disputed. Neighbors and the resort agreed, in every meeting and every commission session, that the buildings needed to come down or come back. Where the story gets interesting is what the resort asked for in exchange for doing it.

Two Different Asks, Bundled Into One Zoning Request

Starting around 2023, Park Hotels & Resorts asked the city to rezone two adjacent parcels from residential to commercial. The request covered two separate projects. One was rebuilding roughly 25 units of employee housing on the lot where the derelict buildings already stood. The other was constructing 23 new hotel villas across seven new buildings on a neighboring parcel, which would have required the resort to secure new transient rental licenses, a category the city hadn't issued fresh in more than a decade, according to reporting in Keys Weekly.

Attorney Gregory Oropeza, representing the resort, told the planning board that Florida had encouraged cities to explore public-private partnerships to expand affordable housing, and that this proposal fit that model. The math worked for the company: pair a housing fix the neighborhood wanted with a room expansion the resort wanted, and let the popularity of the first carry the second.

How the Planning Board Approved It, Then How the Neighborhood Organized

In March 2024, the city's planning board voted to approve the zoning change, despite a staff recommendation to deny it. Two board members, Sam Holland and Ed Russo, voted against approval. Several members later said they voted yes largely because no neighbors had shown up to object, a detail that says as much about public notice as it does about the merits of the plan.

Word got out. In early May 2024, more than 80 neighbors gathered at Jeff and Karen Siegel's house on Washington Street to organize opposition. They formed a group called Protect Our Residential Neighborhoods, sent more than a dozen letters to the city, and packed the May 9 commission meeting, even though commissioners ultimately postponed the vote at the applicant's request. The timeline stretched well past that:

• 2005: Hurricane Wilma floods the employee housing, and the buildings go vacant.
• March 2024: The planning board approves the zoning change, against staff's recommendation.
• Early May 2024: More than 80 neighbors meet at the Siegels' home and form Protect Our Residential Neighborhoods.
• May 9, 2024: The city commission hears public comment and postpones its vote.
• April 1, 2025: The commission votes 5-2 to deny the zoning change. The applicant withdraws the request the same day.

Karen Siegel told Keys Weekly the arrangement felt like the resort was holding the neighborhood's own eyesore hostage to a separate business goal. After the April 2025 vote, Jeff Siegel offered a shorter read on what had happened: the win, he said, belonged to the community, not to any one person.

The Sentence in the Staff Report That Explains Everything

Buried in the planning department's own analysis was the detail that mattered most, and it rarely made the headlines. The staff report noted that rebuilding the employee housing units was already permitted under the property's existing zoning. No change was required. The resort could have started construction on the workforce housing years earlier, at any point, without a single public hearing.

That fact reframes the entire two-year fight. The zoning change was never necessary to fix the eyesore on Waddell Street. It was necessary only for the second project, the 23 new hotel villas and the transient licenses that came with them. By tying the two together, the resort turned a straightforward repair into a referendum on hotel expansion, and stretched what could have been a routine rebuild into a fight that consumed two commission cycles and a change in the makeup of the dais itself.

It's also worth setting this against what the resort was doing elsewhere on the same property during those same years. Around 2023, Casa Marina completed a renovation reported at nearly $80 million, covering guest suites, landscaping, and a new beachfront restaurant that opened the following spring. Capital wasn't the constraint on fixing the employee housing. The zoning change was the point, and the housing fix was the leverage.

What the April Vote Actually Changed, and What It Left Standing

The commission's 5-2 denial on April 1, 2025 killed the hotel expansion. Commissioners Lissette Carey, Aaron Castillo, Monica Haskell, Sam Kaufman, and Donie Lee voted no. Only Commissioner Mary Lou Hoover and Mayor Dee Dee Henriquez supported the request. Park Hotels & Resorts withdrew the application immediately after. Key West Island News summed up the moment plainly: deny the zoning change, and the company was going home rather than build the workforce housing on its own.

What the vote did not do is force any construction. The buildings on Waddell Street remain exactly as vulnerable to the same as-of-right rebuild they were before the fight started. Nothing in the commission's decision compels the resort to act, and nothing in the current record points to a building permit having been pulled since. The denial closed one door. It left the other one exactly where it was.

What It Means If You Live Near It

If you live in Casa Marina and you're used to tracking neighborhood change through commission agendas and planning board notices, this one won't announce itself the same way. Because rebuilding the employee housing needs no zoning approval, it also needs no public hearing. If Park Hotels & Resorts decides to move on it, the first sign you'll see is likely to be a fence coming down or equipment showing up on Seminole Street, not a meeting notice in your mailbox.

Protect Our Residential Neighborhoods is still organized, still led by the Siegels, and still the closest thing the area has to an early-warning system if a new zoning request surfaces for other parcels nearby. For now, the practical reality is simpler than the two-year fight made it look. The lots are legally clear to rebuild. Whether that happens is a decision sitting with a corporate ownership group, not a question waiting on City Hall.

That's the part worth carrying with you the next time you pass an empty building somewhere else on the island and assume the delay is regulatory. Sometimes it is. On Waddell Street, it never was.

If you're curious about what's happening on other blocks in Casa Marina, or what a property's actual zoning allows before you make any decisions about it, Bascom Grooms Real Estate has spent more than 25 years tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer about what's really going on with a property here.