REAL ESTATE INTERVIEW
Community Finishing touches on Midtown Tampa project will help create not only a destination, but a sense of community
Nicholas Haines CEO – Bromley Companies What’s the status the Midtown Tampa project? We broke ground on the Midtown project in May 2019 and we are well under construction for the first phase. There are 11 buildings going up at the same time, three residential, two office buildings, several retail ones including a Whole Foods Kitchen, first-to-market Shack Shack and True Food Kitchen, both of which are significant expansions in the market. A 1,200-car parking garage that is already topped out, and we’re right on schedule. The goal is to finish it by the 2021 Super Bowl, which will be held here in Tampa Bay just a couple miles up the street. A lot of what we are doing now is spending a tremendous amount of time on the finishing touches of the common spaces designs that create community. It is about creating an imaginative destination not just for the people working, living and shopping here, but for the neighborhood by adding public art and a feel for the place, all the things that make a space interesting and dynamic. What business trends are you keeping an eye on? Accessibility and pedestrian-friendliness. I just read about a development in Arizona, with 1,000 residential units and no parking. That is a bold thing for a non super-urban area. What we are trying to do is create one of the first, pedestrian-first mindset versus car-first developments in Tampa Bay and Florida. All the streets inside the development are private which is a really interesting feature of Midtown Tampa. We are not constrained by the city’s rules regarding traffic and street design. For a big event like the Super Bowl, we can close the streets and all the cars access Midtown from the periphery. We have designed curbless sidewalks, for example, and dedicated rideshare drop-off areas. The city of Tampa is working on a number of mass transit initiatives and we are working to accommodate a mass transit stop on one of our
main corridors. People are going to live, work and shop here because they want to wake up, go to a coffee shop, walk their dog to the dog park, go shopping at Whole Foods, have a drink at the hotel rooftop bar, and maybe work at one of the office buildings. They’ll also be able to ride a bike path that connects from Midtown Tampa to the Greenway Trail System. What other areas do you see as a hotspot for real estate developments? It’s really exploding. The Heights area is really interesting. St. Petersburg is incredibly exciting and a great example of a vibrant, urban place with the interplay between food and art. We are talking about a city that has transformed itself over 10 years in terms of the energy there. www.capitalanalyticsassociates.com
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