Overview
The City of Tampa (City) is committed to providing attainable and affordable housing to meet the needs of the current and future population. The City of Tampa, in coordination with the Hillsborough County City-County Planning Commission, is in the early stages of updating the City of Tampa Comprehensive Plan, including the Housing Section of the Plan. To further this commitment, the City will be developing a Housing Needs Assessment. The Assessment will include an analysis of the existing demographic, economic and housing market conditions within the city and evaluation of existing policies and regulations related to residential development. The Assessment will also include a detailed housing demand forecast through the year 2045. Based upon this information, the Assessment will develop recommended policy and regulatory language to support updates to the Tampa Comprehensive Plan and Land Development Code to optimize and increase the overall housing supply to meet current and future needs of the community.
Background
On August 21, 2019, Mayor Castor kicked off the Housing Affordability Advisory Team as part of the Transforming Tampa’s Tomorrow (T3) strategic initiative. The challenge for this team was to recommend approaches to address housing affordability in Tampa and to integrate these recommendations with other Mayoral priorities. The recent influx in population growth has led to gentrification in some neighborhoods as high-income families compete with middle income families and middle-income families compete with lower-income families for the same pools of available housing. At the same time, the supply of public housing and subsidies has struggled to keep up with the level of need for the lowest income households. The team determined that City policies, including land use and zoning regulations, should encourage the development of an adequate supply of housing and range of housing types that residents can afford. The team offered a broad range of ideas including, but not limited to, increasing the supply of housing; revising zoning and land use regulations to allow for a broader range of housing types; density bonuses along major transportation corridors and in high growth districts and incentivizing the development of more workforce and affordable units in mixed use projects. The Assessment will assist the City in building upon and implementing these recommendations, and additional strategies, to support the long-term sustainability of the City’s housing supply.
Timeline
Consultant procurement: Summer 2022
Kick-off: Fall 2022
Estimated Completion: Fall 2024