Tampa's Community Redevelopment Areas — Tampa, Florida

Tampa's community redevelopment areas are eight mapped districts where the city reinvests rising property tax revenue inside the same boundaries. According to the City of Tampa Community Redevelopment Agency, the agency is a public entity established under the Community Redevelopment Act, Chapter 163, Part III of the Florida Statutes, and the districts are Ybor City, East Tampa, West Tampa, Drew Park, Central Park, the Channel District, Tampa Heights Riverfront and Downtown. The same page offers a CRA Lookup in which a Tampa address can be typed to see whether the property falls inside a district; addresses outside the eight areas return no district.

The Tampa agency is not a separate elected body. Its board is made up of the members of Tampa City Council, sitting in a second role, and it works with city staff in a CRA office at 306 E. Jackson St. in downtown Tampa, where tampa.gov listed Cedric McCray as CRA Director on a page updated September 22, 2026. Each district also has a volunteer Community Advisory Committee of residents, owners and business people that advises staff and the board on spending in that one area.

Each Tampa district runs under its own adopted redevelopment plan and its own trust fund, so money raised in Drew Park cannot be shifted to Ybor City or East Tampa. That separation is the defining feature of the system, and it explains why the city publishes a separate annual report, TIF budget report, quarterly TIF report and termination date for every area.

Tax increment financing, usually shortened to TIF, is the money source behind every Tampa district. The City of Tampa CRA explainer on TIF defines it as a method to pay for redevelopment of a slum or blighted area through the increased ad valorem tax revenue resulting from that redevelopment. When a Tampa district is created, the taxable value of property inside it is frozen as a base year. In later years, the growth in tax revenue above that frozen base, called the increment, is deposited in the district's redevelopment trust fund instead of flowing entirely to general budgets.

The arithmetic is set by state law and repeated on the Tampa page. The increment equals 95 percent of the difference between the ad valorem taxes actually levied each year on taxable property inside the area and the taxes the same rate would have produced on the base-year assessed value, leaving out any debt service millage. That formula applies to each taxing authority, which is why Hillsborough County as well as the city pays into Tampa trust funds; the full text sits in Section 163.387 of the Florida Statutes. Certain taxing bodies, such as library districts, a metropolitan transportation authority and a water management district, can be exempt from making deposits.

The Tampa explainer also traces how Florida arrived at this tool. The Community Redevelopment Act was enacted in 1969 without TIF; voters defeated a constitutional amendment authorizing TIF in 1976; the Legislature added TIF by statute the following year; and the Florida Supreme Court upheld it in State v. Miami Beach Redevelopment Agency in 1980. According to the Tampa CRA FAQ, there are currently over 140 CRAs in the State of Florida, and every dollar from a TIF area must be used for redevelopment purposes within that same area.

Florida law also caps how long the Tampa trust funds can run. The pledge of increment revenue is limited to 30 years after a plan is adopted or amended, up to a maximum of 60 years, and agencies created after July 1, 2002 are limited to 40 years, according to the City of Tampa TIF page. Permitted spending includes planning and surveys, land acquisition, site clearance, repayment of bonds and loans, affordable housing and community policing innovations, all inside the district that raised the money.

Ybor City was the first. The City of Tampa Ybor City history page records that on June 2, 1988, Ybor City became a Community Redevelopment Area, with a plan covering 133.1 acres adopted by the agency on June 23, 1988. The original district runs from the CSX railroad line north to I-4 and from Nebraska Avenue east to 22nd Street. In March 2003 the City of Tampa and Hillsborough County signed an interlocal agreement that extended the core area to 2015 and added a second area east of 22nd Street to 26th Street, south of 6th Avenue, running until 2033, which is why Ybor City now has CRA 1 and CRA 2.

Tampa Heights Riverfront grew out of a vacated police site. After the Tampa Police Department moved its headquarters downtown to Franklin Street in 1997, the city created the Old Tampa Police Department Site Community Redevelopment Area and adopted its plan in 1999, according to the Tampa Heights Riverfront history page. The Stetson University law school built on the former headquarters grounds was one of the first milestones, and the district page credits SoHo Capital with restoring the brick Armature Works and completing the Pearl Apartments and the Heights Union office.

Central Park covers the former Central Avenue corridor, described on the Central Park history page as once a thriving African American business and entertainment district where Ray Charles recorded his first song. Tampa City Council adopted the Central Park Community Redevelopment Plan in June 2006. East Tampa, by contrast, is defined by size and age: the East Tampa CRA page gives it a 7.5 square-mile area between Downtown, the Port of Tampa and the University of South Florida, and its history page traces the land to annexations in 1911, 1923 and 1953, with water, wastewater and street systems from those plats now reaching the end of their service lives.

The Channel District began as a port district. The Channel District history page describes ships' chandlers, bonded warehouses and thousands of longshoremen in an area once called the Estuary, La Draga and the Ybor Channel area, until containerized shipping displaced general cargo in the mid-1970s; the Tampa Port Authority's mid-1980s purchase of land on the Garrison and Ybor Channels later evolved into Garrison Seaport. Drew Park, near Tampa International Airport and Hillsborough Community College, is described as one of the few remaining areas in Tampa with affordable industrial land. West Tampa sits between Downtown and the Westshore business district, where the city ties redevelopment to the West River Plan.

Tampa City Council members serve as the Community Redevelopment Agency board, so the seven council members vote on CRA budgets, plans and grants in separate CRA board meetings. City announcements dated June 24 and September 2, 2026 identified Councilwoman Naya Young as CRA Board Chair. Last verified: October 8, 2026, on the City of Tampa website.

Below the board, each Tampa district has a Community Advisory Committee, or CAC. The East Tampa CRA meetings page states that the committees ensure that the interests of residents, property owners, businesses and other stakeholders are represented in key decisions, and that they make recommendations to City staff and the agency. Members must live or work in one of the redevelopment areas or have significant interests there, and they serve without compensation. The city also seeks applicants with backgrounds in neighborhood planning, real estate development or real estate finance.

Meeting times are set district by district. The East Tampa CAC meets on the first Tuesday of the month at City Center at Hanna, 2555 E. Hanna Ave. The Channel District CRA page lists its CAC on the first Wednesday of the month from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Port Tampa Bay Board Room on Channelside Drive. Minutes for each Tampa committee are posted by year on tampa.gov, and the East Tampa roster mixes ex officio seats for neighborhood associations such as Belmont Heights and Jackson Heights with at-large seats.

Grants to property owners are one channel. The Tampa CRA commercial grants page lists five types: Design, Exterior, Interior, Special Projects and Development. A pre-application meeting with CRA staff is required before any application, and Exterior, Interior and Design grants are awarded first-qualified, first-awarded while fiscal year funds last. An August 31, 2026 city announcement set the Special Projects grant at matching funds of up to $999,999 and the Development grant at $1 million or more, with applications open September 1 through November 1, 2026; the Tampa Firefighters Museum downtown had used an earlier Special Projects grant for windows, door restoration and storm shutters.

Street and park projects are another. In Ybor City, the CRA began bricking East 7th Avenue between North 15th and 17th Streets on July 29, 2024, and the 7th Avenue project page puts that first phase at $434,640. The long-range goal is to brick all fourteen blocks from Nick Nuccio Parkway to 26th Street, at an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 bricks per block drawn from a city stockpile stored at the port. The Downtown CRA page reports TIF spending on the Straz, Tampa Theatre and Tampa Museum of Art, and on Herman Massey Park and the Kid Mason Community Center.

Housing and community buildings are a third. On September 2, 2026 the city announced The Vicente, a $9.5 million project turning a former car wash site on the Nebraska Avenue corridor in the V.M. Ybor neighborhood into 20 affordable rental homes, with $3.5 million from the East Tampa CRA and $750,000 from Mayor Jane Castor's housing program funds, for households earning up to 80 percent of area median income. In West Tampa, work began in June 2026 on rebuilding the Rey Park Center, built in 1955, with a West Tampa CRA investment of nearly $4 million and completion expected by December 2027.