Water Street Tampa will go vertical in fall

A joint venture linking Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and hockey team owner Jeffrey Vinik expects to break ground this year for a $3 billion redevelopment of 50 acres along the waterfront in downtown Tampa.

Strategic Property Partners (SPP), a joint venture between Gates’s Cascade Investment, LLC, and Vinik, the owner of the National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lightning, plans the mixed-use, multi-phase development spanning nine million square feet, called Water Street Tampa.

The first phase of vertical construction at the Water Street site, expected to start in fall and finish in 2020, is composed of more than four million square feet of office, residential, hospitality, retail and cultural space. Subsequent phases would be done by 2027.

The development would produce 3,500 residential units for sale or rent, almost doubling the number of residences in downtown Tampa, and the first new downtown office towers in almost 25 years.

Bill Gates

SPP donated an acre of the Water Street Tampa property to the University of South Florida to relocate its for its Morsani College of Medicine and Heart Institute to a new 380,000-square-foot facility. Construction is scheduled to start in August and conclude in the fall of 2019.

The development also includes more than $200 million of infrastructure projects including roadway and public utility work that began last year.