TAMPA, Fla. — Mayor Jane Castor released a roadmap for the city Thursday, full of actions and initiatives designed to make the city stronger from current and future challenges. The plan, which hits on topics from helping neighborhoods to improving infrastructure, is called “Resilient Tampa.”
The Mayor said the report is the culmination of almost two years of collaborative effort.
“This Resilient Tampa roadmap is groundbreaking for our city and will make the city a much, much stronger and resilient community moving into the future,” said Castor.
The roadmap focuses on four key areas: opportunity for all Tampanians, thriving neighborhoods, climate-ready infrastructure, and a growing and connected city. Resilient Tampa lays out 13 goals and nearly 60 actions to implement aimed at better preparing Tampa for the known and unknown shocks and stresses facing the city, including climate risks and economic and social inequities.
“This project was incredibly difficult, and then when you add on top of trying to develop a resiliency roadmap for our community, addressing our current needs, and leading us into the future, if that’s not difficult enough, you put a pandemic on top of it,” said Castor.
One goal in the roadmap under thriving neighborhoods is to increase the supply of affordable housing. An action in the roadmap to make that happen is creating a community land trust based on best practices from models across the country.
Mayor Castor said during a press conference on Thursday that we all know as the city grows, the price of homes and real estate increases.
“By creating this land trust and being able to put plots of land into that land trust, we will make those available to developers, so that they can construct more affordable units, multi-family housing, and also residential units for our community,” said Castor.
The city says the roadmap was created through a community engagement process during the COVID-19 pandemic, including public surveys, workshops, and ideas and suggestions from the people of Tampa.
