Tampa housing development celebrates topping off for 11-story tower

Tampa city councilman Charlie Miranda is no stranger to public housing. 

The lifelong Tampeno grew up in West Tampa’s Ponce de Leon Court, spending his afternoons playing dominoes and gossiping with neighbors on their front porches, watching a much smaller, sleepier world that was Tampa’s West River neighborhood pass by. 

Those homes have long since been demolished, Miranda says, but the developments rising in their place are poised to usher in a transformational new era for the historically working-class urban corridor. And on Friday, Miranda and other city leaders gathered to celebrate the “topping off” of West Tampa’s biggest housing development to date — placing the final structural beam atop an 11-story apartment tower called Gallery at Rome Yards, at 2309 N. Rome Ave. 

“It’s a building that’s really unique and beautiful,” says Miranda, now in his ninth term on Tampa’s City Council. “It’s like a city within a city. A place where you can live, play and work — where people can make a living right where they live. Where else can you get all that?”

What was once an 18-acre city wastewater maintenance yard will soon house 954 apartments and townhomes, more than 33,000 square feet of commercial space and a plethora of new amenities designed to connect the historic waterfront community to the rest of the city. 

The first phase of the roughly $300 million project, Gallery at Rome Yards, is expected to be completed in July 2027. 

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Of the nearly 1,000 homes being built in the Rome Yards development, about 30% will be affordable housing, 43% will be workforce housing and 27% will be market-rate housing, according to Related Urban Development Group, the mixed-income housing division of Related Group. 

And of the 234 income-restricted homes, 58 will be reserved for households earning at or below 20% of Area Median Income; 126 will be set aside for households earning at or below 80% AMI; and 50 will be designated for workforce households earning up to 140% AMI.

Gallery at Rome Yards will also offer ample retail space on its ground floor, along with co-working spaces, a 230-space parking garage, a fitness center, dog park and other sustainable design features that will allow the building to achieve a “green building certification” upon completion, developers say. 

Related Urban says the project is the first tied to a Community Benefits Agreement with the city of Tampa, which has long pushed developers to incorporate workforce housing and local hiring provisions into large redevelopment projects. Under the agreement, at least 40% of businesses hired to work on the project were required to be women- and minority-owned, and 40% of the employees had to be Tampa residents. 

The development is also a product of a “lofty goal” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor’s administration set when she was elected mayor in 2019 to create 10,000 affordable homes in Tampa during her time in office. With roughly 10 more months to go before term limits prevent her from running again for office, Castor has seen roughly 8,300 affordable housing units constructed and more than $100 million invested in such projects, she told the crowd Friday. 

The next project poised for the development’s West River neighborhood list is to extend downtown Tampa’s Riverwalk to the west side of the Hillsborough River, creating a 12-mile loop that stretches from east Tampa to Ballast Point, connecting communities like Gallery at Rome Yards to Tampa’s jobs corridor. 

“There will finally be connections for individuals using electric scooters or bicycles to commute and that connection is critically important, because if we can take cars off of somebody’s budget plate then they have more money for their mortgage payment or their rent,” Castor says. 

Unique to the first phase of the Rome Yards development are five “live/work units” designed to support small business owners by integrating a workspace into where they live. Gallery at Rome Yards will also include a 3,800-square-foot state-of-the-art workforce training center focused on job readiness, resume building and small business support. The West Tampa Community Development Corp. will operate the center in partnership with Related Urban. 

“Today’s topping out ceremony reflects the strong momentum behind the revitalization of West River and the collaborative partnerships making it possible,” Alberto Milo, president of Related Urban Development Group, told the crowd Friday. “Gallery at Rome Yards is designed to provide high-quality housing and meaningful economic opportunity for Tampa residents while creating a vibrant mixed-income community.”