Tampa council unites to slow coastal development as hurricane season looms

Business Journals

24-04-2025

In the wake of recent hurricane damage, Tampa leaders are reconsidering growth policies for vulnerable coastal zones, which could impact housing and jobs.
Story Highlights Tampa City Council opposes intense coastal development to protect lives.
Nearly 96,000 residents expected in hazardous areas by 2050.
Council warns against overdevelopment as hurricane season approaches.
The Tampa City Council is ready to crack down on development in the city's Coastal High Hazard Areas.
During a workshop on Thursday, the council was told that nearly 96,000 Tampa residents are expected to live within the CHHA by 2050. Many residents are still recovering from the devastation of Hurricanes Helene and Milton last October.
In a rare show of solidarity council expressed a unified message following the report: Tampa can no longer support intense development in its coastal neighborhoods.
'We're putting people's lives at risk,' Councilmember Bill Carlson said. 'It's not a debate anymore about developers versus NIMBYs, it's about protecting people's lives.'
From 2020 to 2024, residential numbers shifted, with 52% of new residents moving into the vulnerable areas and 48% moving outside. Currently, roughly two out of every 10 Tampanians live in the CHHA, and one out of every four new residents moves into the CHHA.
Planning Commission staff said they expect the trend to revert to growth patterns before 2020 as capacity is more readily available further inland.
Many jobs are also located within the CHHA. By 2050, it is projected that 163,400 jobs will be located in these vulnerable areas, up from the 127,639 jobs in the CHHA in 2020.
Currently, over 70% of jobs in the city are outside of the CHHA, and staff expect that this will increase to 84% by 2050.
Part of the shift is simply due to many areas along or near the water being built out. The properties staff identified as being most likely to be developed or redeveloped lie further inland, and growth is expected to continue to balloon further away from the coast, where there is more available land.
But without meaningful changes to land use codes, developers can continue to redevelop existing properties along the waterfront, and many are attempting to do so with greater density—for example, tearing down a single-family home and replacing it with a duplex or triplex or petitioning to rezone existing industrial property to construct hundreds of units.
As Tampa recovers, the clock is ticking. In just over five weeks, the 2025 Hurricane Season will begin.
Councilmember Alan Clendenin warned staff that any plan to overdevelop the CHHA would be 'dead on arrival' when it came before the council.
'These policies and the data you just presented us are only going to work if those of us in government create policies that are intentional to minimize growth in hazardous areas,' Clendenin said. 'If we bury our heads in the sand and pretend they don't exist and allow density to explode in these areas, then your data won't reflect reality.'
Carlson said building the infrastructure to accommodate the flooding in the CHHA costs billions of dollars, which is not fiscally responsible when there is 'plenty of land' to build on at a higher elevation.
There is also the issue of overcrowding already-strained roadways during evacuations. Outside of the downtown core—which has many buildings built to withstand hurricane-force winds and is nestled between multiple interstates—CHHA properties often see hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic as fleeing residents slowly crawl toward a major roadway.
Chair Guido Maniscalco said the data following the destruction of Hurricanes Helene and Milton showed that Tampa was not fully prepared. Florida's tremendous growth has negatively affected its natural habitat, and Maniscalco said the more that is built, 'the less place the water has to go.'
'You can't beat storm surge, you can't beat hurricanes,' Maniscalco said. 'Mother Nature, in the end, depending on intensity, can always win.'