St. Petersburg Bets on Affordable Housing at the Trop. Can it Deliver?

Getting developers to build affordable housing is a tough sell.

It means making apartments plush enough to lease to doctors and lawyers but renting them for as little as half the going market rate for the next 50 years.

That math only works with hard-to-obtain subsidies from local and state government. Even then, most affordable housing projects are at best a piecemeal solution that add some 50 or so homes built on the cheapest land available.

With his decision to rip up his predecessor’s plans for the Trop site and prioritize affordable housing for the historic Gas Plant district, St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch is hoping to turn that pattern on its head. Building lower-rent housing on the city’s marquee redevelopment project would honor the predominantly Black neighborhood that was razed to make way for an industrial park that was never built, he said.

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