Broward County High Velocity Hurricane Zone

Barndominium Builders in Pembroke Pines, FL

Pembroke Pines is Broward's second most populous city, and like the rest of the county it's built out: the Land Development Code still carries Agriculture, Agriculture Excavation, and Residential Estate zoning districts, and the Comprehensive Plan still recognizes Agricultural and Rural Ranches future land use categories, but the buildable ground under those designations has shrunk to a handful of parcels on the city's western edge, one of the last of which was actively being cleared as of recent reporting. The realistic Pembroke Pines project is a compact, steel-framed shouse or shop-house on a standard city residential lot, not a multi-acre build. If genuine acreage is what you're after, unincorporated Broward, Southwest Ranches, and Davie are the honest answer, not a promise we can't keep inside city limits. Every build here still sits inside Broward's HVHZ: 170 mph design wind, mandatory Exposure C, and a 24-gauge metal-building floor that most stock kits don't meet.

Pembroke Pines at a glance

County: Broward County
Population: 179,326
Also serving in Broward County: Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Miramar, Coral Springs, Pompano Beach, Davie

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Building conditions in Pembroke Pines

What actually changes from one Florida city to the next: who issues the permit, what wind speed the structure has to be engineered to, and what the ground is like. These are the numbers your drawings have to satisfy.

Build conditions for Pembroke Pines, drawn from the sourced facts on this page. Every figure above is cited in the quick-facts panel below, with its source and vintage.

Almost no buildable acreage left inside city limits

Pembroke Pines' Land Development Code (Ch. 155, Ordinance 2021-02) still carries Agriculture (A), Agriculture Excavation (A-E), and Residential Estate zoning districts, and the city's Comprehensive Plan still recognizes Agricultural and Rural Ranches future land use categories allowing roughly one home per 2 to 2.5 acres. On paper that sounds like real acreage. On the ground it isn't: local reporting has documented one of the last few privately-owned, farming-zoned lots left in the city, on 196th Avenue between Pines Boulevard and Pembroke Road, actively being cleared under a permit while a city commissioner weighed a rezoning vote against a city buyout. We don't sell clients on acreage that's this scarce and contested; if you need real multi-acre ground, we point you to unincorporated Broward, Southwest Ranches, or Davie instead.

City of Pembroke Pines LDC Ch. 155 §§155.410-411 (sourced via a third-party Zoneomics mirror); Future Land Use Element, ppines.com/DocumentCenter/View/643, §§VIII.14 & VIII.20; CBS News Miami, 'Undeveloped tracts of land in Pembroke Pines disappearing?', a news account, not a government record, exact parcel and status unconfirmed against the Broward County Property Appraiser.

Design wind speed

170 mph for a house (Risk Category II), the same flat, county-prescribed figure that applies everywhere in Broward, coastal or inland. It's not read off a contour map inside the HVHZ, it's set by statute for the whole county.

Florida Building Code 8th Edition (2023) §1620, per our Broward/Fort Lauderdale research. Note 175 mph is Miami-Dade, not Broward, the two get conflated constantly in HVHZ marketing copy.

Flood insurance: Class 5, better than Fort Lauderdale

Pembroke Pines carries a Community Rating System Class 5; the city's own page states that's good for up to 25% off NFIP flood insurance premiums. That's two full classes better than Fort Lauderdale's Class 7 (15% SFHA / 10% non-SFHA), two cities in the same county, two different ratings.

City of Pembroke Pines, 'Flood Insurance Information' page, ppines.com/1705/Flood-Insurance-Information. The page doesn't state an effective date or break out a separate non-SFHA discount percentage the way Fort Lauderdale's does; we confirm the current class and any non-SFHA discount against FEMA's CRS eligible-communities list before finalizing a client's insurance estimate.

City permit fee schedule, adopted October 2025

Pembroke Pines publishes a genuinely granular fee schedule: a $500 submittal deposit on new residential construction, a core permit fee of 3.79% of construction cost between $2,500 and $1,000,000 (dropping to 2.77% above that, 2.08% above $3,000,000), plus a $138.24 zoning review fee and a $27.11 engineering review fee. It escalates every October 1st by CPI-U.

City of Pembroke Pines Building Fee Schedule, Appendix to LDC §150.16, ppines.com/DocumentCenter/View/8077, adopted 1 October 2025 (PDF retrieved and read directly).

Only one impact fee survives here: the county school fee

Broward suspended its countywide road and park impact fees effective 1 October 2024 (Ordinance 2024-34). What's left, and applies uniformly across all 31 Broward municipalities including Pembroke Pines, is the county school impact fee: $8,809 for a single-family home with 3 bedrooms or fewer, $11,070 for 4 or more, unchanged since it took effect 1 January 2022 with no CPI escalator.

Broward County School Impact Fee Schedule, broward.org/Planning/Forms Publications/Documents/SchoolFees.pdf.

Broward County's second-largest city

179,326 residents as of the Census Bureau's Vintage 2024 estimate, second only to Fort Lauderdale (190,641) and ahead of Hollywood (159,073) among Broward's cities. It sits inside a county that authorized just 730 single-family permits in all of 2025, only 26% of residential units, so this is a premium custom-build market, not a volume one.

U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2024 population estimates (sub-est2024.csv); U.S. Census Building Permits Survey county files, 2025, both via our Broward/Fort Lauderdale research.

Also worth knowing before you build in Pembroke Pines

What the zoning code actually allows, on paper: Three low-density districts exist in the code: Agriculture (A), 35,000 sq ft minimum lot, 60 ft height cap; Agriculture Excavation (A-E), 5-acre minimum; and Residential Estate (R-E), 35,000 sq ft minimum. The Comprehensive Plan's Agricultural and Rural Ranches future land use categories cap density at 1 dwelling per 2 net acres (or 2.5 gross), with quarrying, cattle ranching, and horse ranches among the permitted uses.
Where the real acreage is instead: Southwest Ranches (2 net acres for A-1/A-2 agricultural, 1 net acre for RE, 2 to 2.5 net acres for RR/RR-A) and Davie (AG and RR districts at roughly 1 dwelling per acre) are the genuinely rural jurisdictions in Broward. Unincorporated Broward itself carries no metal-cladding restriction in its residential zoning code either. All three sit close enough to Pembroke Pines to serve the same buyer who wants real acreage.
Who issues your permit: City of Pembroke Pines Building Department (Building Code Services Division), 601 City Center Way, 2nd Floor, (954) 435-6502. Applications go through the Pembroke Pines Development HUB, an EnerGov-based online portal launched 4 April 2022; the city stopped accepting permit applications by email as of 25 April 2022. Planning & Economic Development, which handles zoning and tree removal, sits one floor up in the same building.
Permit review deadline applies with no city carve-out: 30 business days for a complete single-family application under 7,500 sq ft, with a 10% permit-fee reduction per business day the city runs late. There's no HVHZ or city-size exception, in Pembroke Pines or anywhere else in Florida.
What the HVHZ demands of a metal building here: Same as the rest of Broward, no suburban discount: roof and wall sheets must be 24-gauge minimum against the 26-29 gauge the national kit market runs on, the whole county is mandatory Exposure Category C, and a Florida-licensed engineer has to seal the site-specific adaptation covering foundation and anchorage as one system.
Statewide product approval works here too: You don't need a Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance in Pembroke Pines. A statewide Florida Product Approval carrying HVHZ approval is equally valid, because F.S. 553.842 bars a local jurisdiction from demanding further evidence for an approved product. What matters is HVHZ-approved or not, never which agency issued the paperwork.
A large, planned suburb built on former farmland: Pembroke Pines began in the 1950s as a series of subdivisions built on former agricultural land and marketed to returning WWII veterans, the root of its identity as a large, master-planned suburb rather than an organically grown town. C.B. Smith Park, a roughly 299-acre Broward County regional park with the Paradise Cove water park, sits inside city limits as one of the area's genuine landmarks.
Rainfall and hurricane wind record: No Pembroke Pines-specific weather station exists; the nearest official long-record station is Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International, roughly 10-12 miles northeast, in the same climate and wind-exposure basin: 62.18 in/yr average rainfall, and a 99 mph gust measured during Hurricane Wilma in 2005, well under the 170 mph design standard.
The most common misconception about Broward suburbs: Some buyers assume HVHZ rules are lighter outside Fort Lauderdale proper. They aren't. The 170 mph design wind speed, mandatory Exposure C, and 24-gauge metal-building floor apply countywide with no municipal exception, Pembroke Pines included.

Below the slab

The expensive surprises are in the ground, not the building

Most of Broward County rates poorly for dwellings in the soil survey, and the reason is water sitting close to the surface rather than weak ground. That makes the pad elevation and the drainage plan the two line items most likely to move your budget. We price the dirt before we price the building.

What we build in Pembroke Pines

Every service we offer is available across Broward County, from a shell kit you erect yourself to a finished home we hand you the keys to. What a build costs depends far more on the parcel than on square footage, so we price against your land rather than publishing a rate card.

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What a build looks like

Three stages every Pembroke Pines project passes through, from a raw parcel to a finished home. Site work first, because that is where the budget is decided.

Stage one

The parcel

Zoning, setbacks, flood zone and utility access get checked before anything is drawn.

Stage two

Pad and permit

Clearing, grading and a compacted pad, while the submittal works through Broward County.

Stage three

Frame to finish

Shell erected and dried in, then systems, insulation and interior finish through to CO.

Those are the rules for Broward County. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it to them.

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Where we build around Pembroke Pines

Broward County and the rural land around it. The buildable acreage for a project this size usually sits outside the city limits, which is frequently what changes who issues your permit.

Our Pembroke Pines service area, covering Broward County and the surrounding rural acreage. We build across this area from our office in Lake Mary, FL — this map marks the territory we serve, not a branch location.

Keep reading

The questions that usually come next once you know what Pembroke Pines allows.

Is It Legal in Florida?

Classification, zoning, and what the High Velocity Hurricane Zone actually requires in Broward County.

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Barndominium Cost Guide

Sourced ranges by tier, plus the Florida adders that land on top of a national average.

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How Long Does It Take?

Census build-duration data, and the Florida statute capping permit review at 30 business days.

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Sources for this page

The primary documents behind the Pembroke Pines figures above. We would rather you checked them than took our word for it.

Nearby areas we build in

Close to Pembroke Pines, though the permitting authority and wind requirements can differ once you cross a county line.

Broward County

Broward County

Broward County

Building in Pembroke Pines: common questions

9 questions we get asked most often about building in Pembroke Pines. If yours is not on the list, ask it directly.

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Can I build a barndominium on acreage in Pembroke Pines?

Technically, a little zoning for it still exists. The Land Development Code carries Agriculture, Agriculture Excavation, and Residential Estate districts, and the Comprehensive Plan's Agricultural and Rural Ranches future land use categories allow roughly one home per 2 to 2.5 acres. But we won't pretend that's a real supply: local reporting has documented one of the last few privately-owned farming-zoned parcels left in the city actively being cleared, with a city commissioner on record weighing whether to rezone it for homes or have the city buy it outright. What's realistic inside Pembroke Pines is a compact, steel-framed shouse or shop-house on a standard city lot. If you genuinely need multiple acres, we'd point you to Southwest Ranches, Davie, or unincorporated Broward instead of trying to force an acreage build inside the city.

What wind speed does my building have to be engineered to?

170 mph, Risk Category II, and it's a flat figure the code sets for the entire county rather than something read off a contour map. Every Pembroke Pines parcel gets the same number, whether it's near the Everglades buffer or closer to the city center. That's the Broward figure, not Miami-Dade's 175 mph, a distinction that gets confused constantly in HVHZ marketing material.

Does the HVHZ actually change how my building gets built?

Yes, and it's mostly structural, not just windows. Roof and wall sheets need to be 24-gauge steel minimum, well above the 26 to 29 gauge most national kit packages run on. The entire county is treated as Exposure Category C no matter how sheltered your lot looks. And a Florida-licensed engineer has to seal the site-specific adaptation covering the foundation and anchorage as one complete system, not sign off on a generic package. A stock building sold nationally will very likely not meet Broward's floor.

Who issues my permit in Pembroke Pines?

The City of Pembroke Pines Building Department, Building Code Services Division, at 601 City Center Way, (954) 435-6502. Applications go through the Pembroke Pines Development HUB, the city's EnerGov-based online portal, and the city stopped accepting permit applications by email back in April 2022. Planning & Economic Development, which handles zoning and tree removal, is one floor up in the same building.

What impact fees should I budget for?

Just one reaches a Pembroke Pines single-family permit right now: the Broward County school impact fee, $8,809 for a home with 3 bedrooms or fewer, $11,070 for 4 or more. The county suspended its road and park impact fees countywide in October 2024, so the school fee is what's left. We confirm any Pembroke Pines-specific water or sewer connection charge directly with the city's Utilities Division before finalizing a client's budget, since Broward is almost entirely municipal-utility territory.

What does the city charge for the building permit itself?

Pembroke Pines runs one of the more transparent fee schedules we've seen in Broward, adopted October 2025: a $500 submittal deposit on new residential construction, then a core fee starting at 3.79% of construction cost up to $1,000,000, stepping down to 2.77% and then 2.08% above that. There's also a $138.24 zoning review fee and a $27.11 engineering review fee, and the whole schedule escalates every October 1st with CPI.

What's my flood insurance situation?

Better than most of Broward. Pembroke Pines carries a Community Rating System Class 5, good for up to 25% off NFIP premiums per the city's own page, two full classes better than Fort Lauderdale's Class 7. Every Broward city rates its own class though, so that number doesn't transfer if you're comparing against a different city, and we verify the current class against FEMA's CRS list before a client budgets around it.

Do I need a Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance for my products?

No. Pembroke Pines is Broward County, and a statewide Florida Product Approval carrying HVHZ approval is fully valid here, the same as a Miami-Dade NOA. Florida law bars a local jurisdiction from demanding extra evidence once a product holds statewide approval. What actually matters is whether the product is HVHZ-approved, not which agency's stamp is on it.

If acreage is mostly gone, what can I actually build here?

A compact, steel-framed shouse or shop-house on a standard city residential lot is the realistic Pembroke Pines project, the same honest framing we give clients in St. Petersburg. Pembroke Pines was built out as a planned postwar suburb, not a rural community, and the handful of remaining agriculture-zoned parcels are scarce and increasingly contested between development and city acquisition. We design for the lot you can actually get here, and we point acreage-seekers toward Southwest Ranches, Davie, or unincorporated Broward for the multi-acre version of this build.

Building in Pembroke Pines?

Start with the plan. Tell us what you want to build and we will draw it, then confirm what Broward County will actually let you put on the parcel and what wind load it has to meet. That conversation costs nothing.

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