Downtown St. Pete developer is crafting a blueprint for affordable housing in Florida
By Breanne Williams
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Apr 20, 2022

A planned affordable housing project in downtown St. Petersburg could become a blueprint for developers that want to take advantage of a new house bill related to non-housing zoned areas.

St. Pete-based HP Capital Group is behind Reflection Condominiums, a 19-story apartment tower and a 264-unit affordable housing development, and is the first in the state to propose based on the bill. HP Capital said they have received a wave of interest from landowners and other municipalities wanting to partner and discuss the details of their project.

Florida House Bill 1339 — which passed in 2020 — allows municipalities to approve affordable housing developments on parcels of land that are zoned for residential, commercial or industrial use. In 2021, St. Pete became the first city in the state to create an ordinance that helps build a path to qualify under the house bill.

Angelo Cappelli, a partner with HP Capital Group, said they have a strong relationship with the current landowner of the site at 31st Street S and when they realized the property “checked all the boxes” for the new house bill, they decided to see if St. Pete “wanted to be a pioneer in that aspect.”

HP Capital Partner Nick Hansen’s experience with government affairs paired well with this undertaking and Cappelli said they were able to encourage St. Pete to create the ordinance, which set things in motion for this to become the first project under HB 1339.

“The idea obviously is to open up more nontraditional lands and apply flexible usage through affordable housing and we hope ours will be the blueprint not only for additional projects by us but even by other developers,” Hansen said. “Right now you really only have two main sources of affordable housing: tax credits, which are based on a lottery system and while they’re successful, they’re very limited and difficult to do; and the second is you can do market rate with a small percentage of your units being affordable.”

Hansen said they hope to show other developers and municipalities how to take advantage of the new bill.

The feedback has been near overwhelming — from residents wanting to find out when they can secure an apartment to landowners asking for the group to look at their property to decide if it’s a good fit for the development. Hansen said they’ve even had outreach from several local governments asking how to take advantage of the law.

Cappelli said a city on the east coast of the state has reached out to try to simulate what HP Capital Group is doing here. He added that their hope going forward is they can continue to create projects like this elsewhere and others will follow to “create an exponential effect for the good of all.”

For the 31st Street S development, the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners will vote next month on a Penny for Pinellas grant to buy the land and put it in a land trust for 99 years. Cappelli said they anticipate hearing from the Department of Housing and Urban Development about their construction financing soon, which will allow them to close on the construction loan within three to five months. Construction will start immediately after and is expected to take 14 to 16 months.

He said units will be rented at the tail end of construction, in the first quarter of 2024, and they anticipate the development filling quickly due to the need in the area.

“Our group has a lot of projects going on particularly in St. Petersburg right now and we are excited about the idea that we have all types of products here because we are all from St. Petersburg,” Cappelli said. “But we are primarily focused going forward on affordable housing. ... We will be looking for other affordable housing developments, they won’t necessarily always be this big, but we’d definitely like to see if we can take advantage of this opportunity because we know the need is there.”