St. Pete developer sees potential in 'dinosaur' strip plazas
By Breanne Williams
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Aug 9, 2023

Former St. Petersburg City Council member Robert Blackmon believes the city’s next wave of hyperlocal development will be the renovation of mid-century strip centers.

In 2019, Blackmon acquired the shopping plaza at 1506 54th Ave. N via a 1031 exchange (a tax break that allows investors to defer capital gains taxes by reinvesting the proceeds from selling a property into the acquisition of another). He had been looking to purchase a multifamily property, but as the deadline for the exchange approached, he was offered the 5,600-square-foot strip center between Euclid Heights and Meadowlawn neighborhoods. He said he had never done a commercial deal but decided to give it a chance.

“If done properly, the function of these mid-century strip malls is that they can be small business incubators,” Blackmon told the Tampa Bay Business Journal. “You can take a property that is a liability and make it an asset. Typically chains or other larger concepts would view these older properties as a liability, so it gives a chance for local businesses to get a brick-and-mortar location and see if they can be successful.”

When the pandemic hit, all of the tenants but one left. His friends in commercial development told him to wait to renovate the space until he had a tenant lined up to replace them. They warned him it was a “bad bet” and that aging retail shopping plazas were “dinosaurs” with no chance of being successfully repurposed.

He renovated one unit for Bayview Barber Co., and Blackmon said watching the tenant take the space and make it their own motivated him to keep going. After an investment of more than $500,000, he’s ready to call it a success — and look for similar opportunities.

He is finalizing the renovation of the site and has leased out every unit but one at the plaza. The corner unit — which was originally the Hillside Sundries — is roughly 2,250 square feet. It has two bathrooms, an outdoor patio and is zoned for drive-thru. He said he hopes to bring a coffee shop or café to the site.

The property was home to the first Li’l General in St. Pete and had an old soda shop. The plaza is near Northeast High School, where both of Blackmon’s parents went to school. His mother joked that when she shopped at the plaza after school in the ’60s, never in her wildest dreams did she expect that her son would buy the place decades later.

He has installed a new roof, resealed the asphalt, upgraded the interior and exterior lighting, upgraded the interior of each unit including restoring the terrazzo, put up a fence, redone the exterior and fixed the sign for the property, which he renamed Hillside Center.

Blackmon said he hopes the plaza can become a “proof of concept” and that other developers will embrace the responsibility of returning commercial assets to local neighborhoods. He said St. Pete neighborhoods have recently begun to focus on being hyperlocal and that shop-local trends are increasing demand for retail assets within walking or biking distance of homes.

“Neighborhoods are going local, but commercial is largely going national with a focus on big box retail,” Blackmon said. “When you have a high-density usage, you have a duty to the neighborhood to protect, maintain and beautify that property.”

He said a few “bad apples can spoil a bunch” and pointed to 34th Street, where small retailers are being driven out. Blackmon said he believes these neighborhood strip centers are the answer. Developers can rent the sites at a lower dollar per square foot and bring unique small businesses to a renovated plaza. Businesses not large enough to lease downtown can build a foundation in a neighborhood and grow from there.

Blackmon recently purchased an old gas station in the Harbordale neighborhood and plans to transform the site into a coffee house. He said he wants to prioritize keeping neighborhoods bikeable and walkable, which he said keeps the dollars in a community. He said he’s not anti-big business but believes there is “a right place for that,” just as there’s room for smaller retail.

“I would like to duplicate this elsewhere in St. Pete,” Blackmon said. “It’s not traditional, but theoretically, it’s scalable. The next thing we as a city need to focus on is encouraging hyperlocal development. We talk about food deserts; we talk about lack of transportation and the fact that all the development is funneled right now to downtown or Tyrone or Carillon. But these properties could be part of that answer.”