ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — You can’t go very far on Central Avenue in Downtown St. Pete without seeing luxury apartments being built nearly everywhere.
But the people who work downtown say they’re being pushed out because of skyrocketing rent costs.
St. Pete native Heather Brodesser has worked along Central Avenue for decades.
"I'm proud of my city. It's become an art mecca," Brodesser said. "It's a very diverse and beautiful city."
But those wonderful people who have given Downtown St. Pete so much character are meeting their own demise.
"There are a lot of us here who are really the grit of this strip," Brodesser said. "The artists, the musicians, the cooks, and the bartenders who have been here for years are being forced out."
Forced out because rent is too high.
Loose COVID-19 restrictions caused people from across the country to move to Florida at an unprecedented rate, a lot of them coming to the culturally rich area of Downtown St. Pete.
But lack of available housing caused rents to skyrocket.
From December 2019 to December 2022, rent increased in St. Pete by more than 50%. Now builders are taking advantage of the need for housing.
"They keep building and building and building and building, which I understand, however, the housing they’re building is not affordable," said Brodesser.
As the high-rise luxury apartments are constructed across the street from where Brodesser works at Lonni’s Sandwiches on Central, she’s having to leave the St. Pete neighborhood she’s lived for 20 years because she can no longer afford the rent.
"I’m being forced to move much, much further away," she said.
The new Orange Station project on Central is supposed to include some workforce housing units, but right now, the lot sits overgrown and vacant.
The city is offering incentives to some builders to include workforce housing units in their luxury buildings, like the proposal of a new 1,000+ unit apartment complex being built on the old Raytheon site in the Tyrone district of St. Pete. 300 of the units will be for workforce housing.
The city also said they have a 10-year plan to address housing affordability that will impact 7,000 households.
But for right now, it’s just not enough.
Brodesser said all she can do is watch the luxury apartments go up and the character of the city she loves go down.
"It's really sad that we’ve gone from, in the depression, to helping each other and mending each other’s fences to pushing each other away for people to come in and spend a lot of money for a short-term period of time," said Brodesser.
She hopes affordable housing will come quickly enough to help others facing the same fate.
