Miami developer ready to capitalize on new zoning in St. Pete's Warehouse Arts district
By Henry Queen
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Sep 24, 2024

Developer Joe Furst spent years working with St. Petersburg officials to update the zoning code in the Warehouse Arts district to allow for multifamily development.

Those years have cost him, as the financing environment isn’t as favorable as it would have been prior to 2022. But Furst has no regrets. The founder and managing principal of Miami-based Place Projects owns about 7 acres in the district and is ready to move forward on one of his development projects in 2025.

“This has definitely been a marathon,” Furst said during one of the many meetings he traveled to St. Pete to attend. “But the good news about the marathon is that it really ensured the entire community ... understood the process. And the support has only continued to mount.”

St. Pete City Council gave final approval to the 58-acre zoning overlay earlier this month. The overlay will build on the business activity that began flourishing about 10 years ago following the creation of the Warehouse Arts District Association. The area is already home to everything from claymakers to ballet dancers to brewers. Pop-up food markets are common, and a nearby indoor pickleball development is in the works.

The St. Pete Downtown Partnership on Tuesday evening will discuss next steps for the district, which is located across Interstate 275 from Tropicana Field and features the Pinellas Trail as a focal point.

Furst hired San Antonio, Texas-based Lake Flato Architects to execute design work on his three parcels between Third Avenue South and Fifth Avenue South on 22nd Street. That planning stage is expected to be finished by the end of the year.

He provided more details on his projects in this lightly edited discussion.

What does the planning process look like for your land? We’re working on all the sites as a collective. It’s obviously too much scale to think about building all at one time, but I think it’s very important when thinking about an urban design framework to ensure that one project is speaking to another. That way, there’s a rhyme or reason for what goes where. It’ll take us the next few months to get that framework set, and then, at that point, we’ll start looking to figure out which site we should work on and develop first. Hopefully we’ll be in a friendlier capital markets environment to find the right capitalization to move one of those projects to fruition.

There was little to no opposition to these zoning changes. How were you able to garner so much support? This was really a community-led initiative. There’s a lot of different interests. Some people are more traditional real property owners. You have working artists and working manufacturers, whether it’s 3 Daughters or other breweries. You have existing office and light industrial users there. Everyone has slightly different things they’re focused on in terms of their priority list, but the general vision was very much the glue that kept everybody together.

It did take a while, and interest rates have risen significantly in that time. Are there any projects you planned to do here but now can’t? You can’t time everything perfectly. Coming out of Covid, there was one of the most robust economic cycles for real estate that has happened in a while. That has obviously tapered off and gone the other direction. So, yes, if all the zoning was done and all the entitlements were in place, and we were able to capture some of that uplift coming out of Covid, that would have been a great opportunity for us. But we’re still going to do the best we can. I still have other projects around the state that are being built in a more challenging environment. It’s going to be harder, and it may take longer, but it doesn’t change what I think is a great series of projects and a great district that will emerge.

What other projects are you working on in Florida? My largest project in terms of scale, capitalization and workload is our project in West Palm Beach called Nora, which is basically a part adaptive reuse and part redevelopment of about 14 acres in downtown West Palm Beach. That’s one that we were able to capitalize on and start construction as we were coming out of Covid. We selected the right partners there with the right business plan, and we’re full-speed ahead — even as the macroeconomic climate has become more challenging. It’s not truly comparable to what we have in St. Pete because there are already some really great beacons of vibrancy and activity in the Warehouse Arts district. In West Palm, we didn’t have that. There was some character and interesting buildings, but we have to create all the vibrancy and demand-generating uses. So, in a way, St. Pete is more about finding accretive businesses and uses that allow that area to continue to flourish.

Do you have an estimated timeline and unit counts for your projects here? It’s too early. The plan [from Lake Flato Architects] will start to lay a foundation for what we can actually deliver. Then once that’s complete, we’ll work on a specific project. It will be subject to interest rates, capital markets — all those things — but we feel very confident that by some time in the early to middle part of next year, we’ll have traction on moving a project forward.