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Trigaux: In downtown St. Pete and Tampa, residential tower building sprees accelerate

 
Published Jan. 4, 2016

Another day, another tower.

So it seems these days in downtown St. Petersburg, where the recent flood of announced apartment and condo towers to be built is now spilling over into 2016. On Monday, South Florida developer American Land Ventures said it will build a 22-story tower across from a Publix-anchored shopping center and an almost-finished 18-story apartment tower.

Across downtown Tampa, towers are migrating from drawing board to construction site at a torrid pace.

Who can't be thrilled at a tower boom in parts of Tampa Bay? Anybody who has suffered decades of inactivity in downtown St. Pete and Tampa must feel: It's about time.

So consider this less of a warning and more of a cautionary column. Between downtown St. Pete and downtown Tampa, there are more than a dozen residential towers in some form of development. Combined, they will unleash thousands of apartments and condos on the market in the next several years.

I hope the cities can absorb all these new places to live. And I hope the cities realize the formidable volume of people coming — and bringing their cars (and their dogs) and their demands for urban services — to two downtowns sorely out of practice in handling urban boomtowns.

The latest round of new towers comes as a national survey finds that the rise in rents is starting to slow. That's good news for renters, of course. But maybe not so much for developers.

According to Apartment List, which tracks hundreds of thousands of rental listings on its site, nationwide average rents increased by 3.6 percent for a 1-bedroom unit and 2.6 percent for a 2-bedroom unit between December 2014 and December 2015. Those numbers reflect a month-over-month decrease of 0.3 percent for 1-bedroom units and 0.4 percent for 2-bedroom units.

In the past year, St. Petersburg's average rents for a 1-bedroom unit increased to $800. That's up 11.9 percent, the fourth-highest leap among 100 U.S. and Canadian cities. Month to month, though, 1-bedroom St. Pete rents rose 0.9 percent between November and December, ranking the city 23rd among 100 cities.

In Tampa, 1-bedroom rents rose 8.9 percent in the past year to an average of $940, a gain ranking 10th among 100 cities. Between November and December of last year, though, Tampa rents for the same-sized units grew 0.8 percent on average, ranking the city 25th.

At Apartment List, data scientist Andrew Woo sees nationwide rents continuing to increase, though more slowly, in 2016. "Rent increases in Tampa and other large cities across the country have not been sustainable, so increases should taper off a bit," he says.

Bottom line? Increases in St. Pete and Tampa rents are slowing just as a potential glut from more tower construction hits the downtown pipelines. Will the fresh allure of livelier city cores defy early signs of tightening rent? It bears watching.

Contact Robert Trigaux at rtrigaux@tampabay.com. Follow @venturetampabay.