July '24 Work Plan Update

Thanks to support from our members and board, we are making significant progress on the priorities we identified in our 2024 Work Plan and continue to build momentum in our mission to champion community prosperity through purposeful, transformative projects. In this post, we'll highlight some recent accomplishments. 

Land Use - The Partnership submitted a column in the Tampa Bay Times underscoring our support for Hines-Rays development plans at the Historic Gas Plant District. This support came after many months of behind-the-scenes conversations with the city administration, city council members and the development team. We believe the project has the potential to create a master-planned, mixed-income, complete neighborhood that can be a global example of smart urban design. 

This year, the Partnership helped to launch a Commercial Development Boot Camp in conjunction with St. Pete College. Board member Will Conroy, founder and president of Backstreets Capital, led this effort along with Tahisia Scantling from Right Turn Realty. The boot camp took 37 diverse students through an eight-week boot camp that exposed them to the world of commercial real estate development to broaden the economic benefits of development occurring throughout our urban center.  Partnership members and board leaders acted as instructors. Following this program, six student interns were placed at local companies. We plan to host this boot camp again in Spring 2025. 

The Partnership also provided curated data and analysis on land use through the 2024 Downtown Development Guide, which we released at the 2024 Downtown Development Summit in February alongside keynote presentations from experts from around the country. 

Our recent Developer’s Council meetings have convened local community leaders and real estate professionals to address, Reflections, the nearly completed 18-story luxury condominium tower in Mirror Lake, the effects of House Bill 1365 which bans public camping and the City’s current homeless resources. 

In the next quarter, we plan to start preliminary work on the 2025 Downtown Development Guide, which we plan to streamline to memorialize progress while providing actionable data for investors, property owners and developers to encourage smart growth.

Lifestyle - We are continuing to research the creation of a downtown app to promote downtown events and support local retail, galleries, restaurants, and bars. The Partnership is reviewing apps for other cities and has started conversations with app developers to gauge the scale, timeline, workflow, and cost of developing an app. We plan to partner with Visit St. Pete Clearwater and I Love the Burg to help develop and curate downtown content.

Clean & Green - While pushing pause on a downtown-wide Special Services Area (SSA) the Partnership has been exploring the possibility of a privately funded Williams Park Partnership that would provide clean and safe programs for Williams Park, Central Avenue and surrounding blocks. This would function in many ways like the existing Waterfront Parks Foundation. We have reconstituted the Williams Park Partnership, a 501 C 3 organization, launched several years ago to support this micro-district and have continued to engage regularly with First Block and Central Avenue businesses. We are also looking at other funding sources that could be deployed to provide enhanced security, cleaning, code enforcement, garbage removal, and navigators to assist our unhoused population. 

Resilience - We would like to thank Board Member Matt Walker of George F. Young for the completion of a site analysis of the Hub 2.0 site that supports our continuing exploration of the possibility of the Partnership and Innovation District jointly developing a new facility adjacent to the Maritime and Defense Technology Hub, with a working name: The Center for Coastal Resiliency. 

At the beginning of this year, we hosted a Developer’s Council meeting convening local community leaders and real estate professionals to discuss legislation mandating flood disclosures for potential buyers and renters led by Dawn Shirreffs, EDF’s Florida director and a Partnership board member.

Mobility - The Car-Free St. Pete Committee is exploring becoming an independent nonprofit and potential rebranding to represent the focus of the organization - to provide more accessible transportation options in St. Pete. 

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