Water Street Tampa is the first neighborhood in the world to earn the WELL Community Standard designation.
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Like a flower pushing up through concrete, a unique neighborhood is blossoming in Tampa. Water Street Tampa is undergoing development from the ground up on more than 50 acres in downtown Tampa along the waterfront. The developer, Tampa-based Strategic Property Partners (SPP), is putting health and well-being at the forefront of the transformation with innovative urban planning that provides a blueprint for what a city can be.
The Water Street Tampa initiative is revitalizing an underutilized tract of land to create an urban mixed-use waterfront district encompassing about 9 million square feet zoned for multiple uses, including commercial, residential, hospitality, cultural, entertainment, education and retail, totaling over $3 billion in private investment from SPP.
Water Street Tampa is the first neighborhood in the world to earn the WELL Community Standard, a global benchmark for healthy communities. The designation fosters and cultivates neighborhoods that have health and wellness attributes built into their DNA.
Before it became primarily surface parking lots serving Amalie Arena and Tampa Convention Center, the neighborhood was home to Fort Brooke, a U.S. military outpost from 1824 to 1882; a historically African American neighborhood called Garrison; and part of an active working port.
“What we’re trying to do is create a great place to live, work and visit,” says SPP Chief Executive James Nozar. “ We have the ability to do a lot with the scale we’re working with and the physical location.”
Water Street Tampa envisions a healthy neighborhood where residents of all ages and abilities will have the opportunity to be physically active.
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More than 13 acres of public space and green space are woven throughout the neighborhood. “We’re on the Tampa Riverwalk with a very heavy retail experience at the ground level,” says Nozar, adding: “All those things come together to shape a neighborhood that’s great other than when you’re coming in for the arena or an event. It’s a nice place to be every day and all times of day.”
SPP is placing a priority on creating a walkable, comfortable pedestrian environment. The ambitious development will connect several residential neighborhoods. Nozar says no residents or existing businesses will be displaced or relocated as a result of the project.
He envisions Water Street Tampa connecting “a lot of interesting neighborhoods,” including the Channel District to the east, Harbour Island to the south and the central business district downtown to the north.
“We are essentially creating a neighborhood around the historic namesake Water Street that has been around for a long time,” explains Nozar. “We’re bringing it back and extending it and making it the main street, the main spine to our neighborhood, much like a Michigan Avenue in Chicago or 14th Street in D.C. That’s what we believe Water Street can be. It’s really taking on the identity of a place that lacked one for quite a while.”
The first phase of Water Street Tampa is underway with six buildings under construction, including three renovations and three new structures. The project will expand to include six more building projects starting in June. The 12 projects will cover about 4.5 million square feet.
“That total is about $1.9 billion of investment from our ownership team, which is the start of a 9 million-plus-square-foot overall neighborhood,” says Nozar. “That’s almost doubling the size of downtown Tampa. It’s pretty transformational.”
In 2016, infrastructure and site work started on roadways, stormwater infrastructure, sewer lines and electrical and communication lines. The project is blazing a new path as a smart district. Miles of conduit and fiber are being installed underground to have WiFi throughout public spaces.
“We also built a centralized cooling plant for the entire neighborhood that is under construction now,” says Nozar. “We ran all the cooling lines underground that will ultimately serve all the individual buildings.”
The costs of the infrastructure and road work have been jointly funded in partnership with the City of Tampa.
Nozar is equally excited about Water Street Tampa becoming the first neighborhood in the world to achieve the WELL D&O (Design and Operations) designation under the WELL Community Standard. A WELL community promotes health and well-being across all aspects of community life. Introduced in 2017, the neighborhood-wide certification recognizes and honors neighborhoods that implement design and policy strategies meant to improve the quality of lives of their residents.
Green rooftops can serve as a source of insulation or shade, cut electricity consumption, add green space and reduce air pollution.
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Initiatives at Water Street Tampa include improving walkability with wider sidewalks; activity programming like yoga in the park to encourage physical activity; publicly accessible air-quality monitoring data; water-bottle refilling stations to promote drinking water; reducing light pollution with curfew hours for public realm lighting; mitigating the urban heat island effect through light-colored pavement and shaded sidewalks; installing urban water features such as fountains to moderate temperatures; ensuring that recycling is available throughout the public realm and in every building; having a community wellness center with a demonstration kitchen offering nutritional information and emphasizing access to fresh foods with a full-service neighborhood grocery store in addition to farmers’ markets.
Global environmental business leader Rick Fedrizzi says SPP is on the right track with Water Street Tampa. Fedrizzi, who is chairman and chief executive of the International WELL Building Institute, a public benefit corporation leading the movement to make buildings healthier for all, was involved in developing LEED, which became the world’s most widely used green building rating system.
WELL focuses on ways that buildings and communities, and everything in them, can improve comfort, drive better choices and enhance, not compromise, health and wellness.
Fedrizzi says Water Street Tampa is a way of demonstrating to the world “that the kind of activities that we have put together regarding health and wellness associated with the built environment can be done on a community scale.” After observing what Tampa plans to achieve, Fedrizzi says any city in the world could say, “Hey, why not us?”
He explains, “We’re going to create a healthy, vibrant location for the true live, work, play experience, and then draw people to this area because of that healthy opportunity,” adding that “Water Street Tampa is a way of looking again at why can’t we use our brains, our hearts, our technology and put together places that people truly want to be a part of and are proud to be a part of.”