With pending land sales, downtown Tampa's Encore will be fully built out in three years
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Nov 11, 2022

All five remaining vacant lots in downtown Tampa's Encore district are under contract to be sold — and a boutique grocer, affordable condominiums and medical office space will be built in the next three years.

Encore, a master-planned community just north of downtown Tampa and the Channel district, spans 40 acres. It is developed in a public-private partnership between Tampa Housing Authority and Banc of America Community Redevelopment Corp. and includes both affordable and market-rate residential units.

Here's what developers have planned for the remaining parcels in Encore, Leroy Moore, chief operating officer of THA, told the Tampa Bay Business Journal:

Lot 5 (Corner of East Scott Street and Nebraska Avenue): Condominiums and medical office space

Lot 12 (Corner of East Harrison Street and Nebraska Avenue): Boutique grocer

Lot 10 (1101 E. Harrison St.): Miami-based LD&D's $200 million plans to build a 28-story, 365-unit luxury apartment building as well as 178-key hotel, 32,500 square feet of street-level retail space and a 586-space parking podium

Lot 8 (East Harrison Street and Hank Ballard Street): Market-rate residential and ground-floor retail

Lot 13: Market-rate multifamily

All of those lots are under contract, Moore said, and developers will close on them beginning in December. Others will close in January, and the final closings will be complete by mid-2023. All the developers plan to begin construction immediately upon closing, and each project has roughly an 18-month construction time frame.

The condo project, Moore said, will include some of the first attainable for-sale housing in the urban core. Encore includes affordable housing units, but the current ones are rentals.

THA has made several runs at striking deals with national grocers, but those deals have fallen through. Leroy said he couldn't disclose the grocer coming to Encore but that it is a "boutique" brand that will occupy 30,000 to 35,000 square feet. It's "locally owned, but a national distributor," he said.