Tampa’s waterfront has drawn a slew of property projects
TAMPA, FLORIDA: When Paul Guzzo first set eyes on Tampa in 1999, he was not impressed.
“I thought, this isn’t a city — it’s a ghost town,” said Guzzo, a native of Trenton, New Jersey, who, like so many other Northerners, had moved south for the balmy weather. “It was like a small town looking to become a big city.”
Against his better judgment, he stayed, and has since been able to observe the gradual metamorphosis of the city’s centre: A slew of developments, some completed, others planned or under construction, have imbued Tampa with a sense of dynamism that most people here agree it sorely lacked. Even some of Bill Gates’ billions are in on the action.
“You couldn’t have imagined that it would become what it is,” said Guzzo, 42, who writes about the area’s history, among other topics, for The Tampa Bay Times. “There’s stuff to do downtown. There are people there 24 hours a day. That’s the difference.”
A forecast by Dodge Data & Analytics predicts that $13 billion will be spent on development in the Tampa Bay area — which includes Tampa, Clearwater and St Petersburg — through 2022.
That figure, for both new construction and renovations, includes apartments, condos and commercial and institutional buildings.
The most ambitious of the projects is Water Street Tampa, a $3 billion multiuse development covering 16 blocks on and around the city’s downtown waterfront.
The project is being underwritten by Strategic Property Partners, a joint venture of Cascade Investment, owned by Gates, the Microsoft Corp co-founder, and Jeffrey N. Vinik, the owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey team.
The 42-acre development, scheduled for completion in 2027, will comprise 17 buildings, including two new hotels and the renovation of a third, as well as restaurants and rooftop bars, one million square feet (92,900 square metres) of cultural and retail space, 3,500 residential units and an “innovation hub.”
It will also include two million square feet of office space in what will be the first new office towers here in almost 25 years, according to the developer.
Already under construction in the Water Street development is the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine and Heart Institute, a 325,000-squarefoot (30,194-square-metre) facility that is set to open next year.
“We’re filling the hole in the middle of the doughnut,” said James Nozar,Strategic Property Partners’ chief executive, referring to the Water Street project’s position in a sparsely developed area in the heart of the city, which includes Amalie Arena, home of the Lightning.
“One of the aims of the project is to reconnect downtown to the waterfront,” he said.
To support the outside investment, officials from Tampa and Hillsborough County have agreed to split the roughly $100 million cost of a revamped street grid in and around the Water Street project.
Planned improvements include new parks, sidewalks, storm drains, underground utility and communications pathways, as well as lines connected to a cooling plant that will provide chilled water to the air conditioning systems of the buildings.
The streets are being designed with driverless cars in mind and parking structures that could be converted to other uses. Renderings of the project show wide, verdant sidewalks, with bustling businesses, cafes, shade trees and children running through fountains.
The developer estimated that 23,000 people will fill the Water Street area every day, as residents, visitors or workers.
“I’ve been dreaming of this for a long time,” said Bob Buckhorn, who has been Tampa’s mayor since 2011. “We’ve changed our economic DNA. I knew that if we were going to invest in intellectual capital, we had to create a built environment and an urban core that was attractive to young people, which meant completely transforming downtown Tampa on the waterfront.”
City and county officials hope to attract companies in the high-tech, financial and creative sectors to fill the new space, not only downtown but elsewhere in the area.
In the last three years, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Amgen, Ashley Furniture and Bertram Yachts have opened offices or other facilities in Tampa.
“This whole area has gone through a transformation,” said Noah Breakstone, a managing partner at BTI Partners, a developer based in Fort Lauderdale.
BTI is planning the $400 million Westshore Marina District, a 52-acre waterfront project in Tampa on long-vacant industrial land.
“Tampa presented a strong opportunity for us,” Breakstone said. “It has a lot of dynamics similar to what Miami had in terms of its ability to grow, but Miami is now out of land. Tampa still has available land on the waterfront — a really limited commodity in most places.”
Plans for the Westshore Marina District call for hundreds of town houses and condominiums, as well as restaurants and stores. Its crown jewel will be Marina Pointe, a complex with a 150-slip marina, the largest in Tampa, and three 16-storey towers designed by Miami architect Kobi Karp, each with 110 condominiums.
Three other South Florida developers, the Related Group, Lennar Corp and the Bainbridge Cos, have purchased parcels from BTI in the Westshore site for their own residential developments.
Related, a major Miami-based developer, has several other residential projects in the works in Tampa and St Petersburg, including the rebuilding of Tampa’s oldest public housing site into a $350 million development with 1,636 mixed-income units and 177,000 square feet of commercial space.
To the east of the Westshore Marina District, the New York developer Bromley Cos is planning a mixed-use, 1.8 millionsquare-foot project called Midtown Tampa at a cost of more than $400 million.
In its announcement last month, the developer said that it would include 750,000 square feet of office space, 400 apartments or condominiums, a 225-room hotel and 240,000 square feet of retail and entertainment space.
The Tampa Bay area, which has a combined population of about three million, ranked fourth in the nation in terms of growth in 2016, when some 58,000 people became residents, according to the Census Bureau.
Zillow Research last month named Tampa the top market in the United States for first-time homebuyers.
From 2012 to 2016, about 148,000 jobs were created in the area, said Craig J. Richard, the chief executive of the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corp.
Tampa, he added, has long laboured under an inferiority complex.
“We just plod along as a happy little town, but we don’t know how good we really are,” Richard said. “We’ve got housing affordability, sports teams, museums, beaches, blue skies and palm trees. There are not a lot of places that can claim such a great quality of life.”
He added that the market had been untapped for many years in terms of major construction, especially downtown. “The last thing you want to be, in terms of economic development, is a best-kept secret, but we’ve managed to do that for decades.”