Several Tampa Bay news outlets covered St. Pete’s newest skyscraper. But a satire site may have done the best job at telling residents’ side of the story.
A cluster of century-old buildings on the corner of 4th Street South and 4th Avenue were vacant for a year before a developer hired local artists to turn them pink. In St. Pete fashion, the buildings became a canvas. In late February, artwork climbed their cotton-candy facades during a “mural flash mob,” crowds gathered for photo ops organized by the people who will soon tear the historic buildings down.
The social media account St. Pete Razing (not to be confused with the blog St. Pete Rising) framed the house’s new pink costume with into mock-occult language, describing the repainting as a “transitional submission phase” and a “ceremonial humiliation,” to strip the buildings of their former identity.
Why so salty?
Behind the spectacle is the planned 29-story Roche Bobois St. Pete Tower, a 164-unit luxury condominium development backed by Valor Capital. The firm assembled six parcels between 2023-2025 for $7.3 million and plans call for more than 4,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and restaurant space, a 5,000-square-foot public arts plaza and interiors tied to the French furniture brand Roche Bobois.
Three of the structures slated for demolition date back more than a century, with the oldest built in 1916. Demolition is scheduled for spring, with construction to begin this summer.
While official statements and coverage from other local outlets have largely framed the demolition as routine redevelopment, and the art project as a community service, that tone doesn’t align with the unease voiced by some locals. That disenchantment is more closely represented by St. Pete Razing account holder Cedric Harris.
“The first thing that popped into my mind is it feels like a humiliation ritual,” Harris told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
Though he calls the page satire, Harris was candid about his reaction to the project and the optics of the paint. He grew up downtown and said the buildings’ transformation felt personal.
His faux public notice suggests that repeated “ritualized indignity” helps erode public resistance and soften emotional attachments to the past, making communities more receptive to redevelopment.
“There’s so many people in the Tampa Bay area who are struggling to pay the bills and pay the rent and we’re gonna take affordable housing and we’re gonna dump hundreds of dollars of pink paint on it and then we’re gonna demolish it,” he said. “It was insulting to me—it felt like a victory lap.”
Before vacancy, the apartments functioned as affordable housing for service workers and young professionals. Neighbors say the buildings contributed to the daily rhythm of downtown life, housing bartenders, baristas and hospital staff within walking distance of their jobs.
When tenants left, Wendy Wesley, who lives next door and was born and raised in St. Petersburg told CL that the loss felt immediate.
“It was a really lively building,” Wesley told CL. “I was really sad—where are they going to live now?”
She worries about infrastructure keeping pace with growth, particularly for essential workers increasingly priced out of the urban core. Without stronger public transportation, she said, longer commutes become inevitable, and with its accessibility, the city loses its realness.
Wesley does not believe growth can or should be halted. But she questions whether the city is asking enough in return, and whether the rush to cultivate an image sometimes overtakes deeper concerns. Since the buildings turned pink, she has noticed a surge in foot traffic.
“I love St. Pete, but it’s becoming very Instagramable” she said. “Sometimes I think we’re just too eager to be liked—too eager to be on a post.”
Developer Moises Agami has framed the project as both iconic and accessible. Units are expected to start around $500,000, with other residences reaching into the millions.
Agami did not respond to CL’s interview requests, but in press releases described the pink buildings as “the last burst of creativity” before they are “reborn into an incredible new icon for St. Pete.” Art, he said, is central to the vision.
Valor partnered with the St. Pete Arts Alliance (SPAA) and the Vitale Brothers to produce the mural event, and Agami said select designs will be incorporated permanently into the tower “so you don’t have to be a resident to enjoy the art.”
Helen French, Executive Director at SPAA told CL that her nonprofit gets inquiries from different kinds of entities trying to learn more about the arts and that it merely served as a connector between artists and the developer.
“We didn’t fund it. We didn’t receive funding for it or from it in any way. And it wasn’t an idea that was created in my office,” French added.
Some artists defended the spectacle. Longtime Bay area muralist Derek Donnelly, who served as a lead and artists liaison for the 2025 Shine mural festival, went on social media and said, “There’s something meaningful about choosing art in the middle of change. About color in the middle of demolition. About community showing up to witness it.”
Shine founder Leon Bedore, however, had a different take and called the project “a very large, very pink mockery of what ‘art’ actually means.”
Bedore, AKA Tes One, told CL that some of SPAA’s largest donors are real estate developers. He criticized the nonprofit’s choice to connect the developer “to a willing paint team that sees the opportunity before the optics.”
“The paint team then invites local artists to an ‘art jam,’ dismissing the fact that the work will be used to amplify the developer’s out-of-touch marketing language: ‘Art is the Ultimate Luxury,’ painted three stories tall on a historic St. Pete building set to be demolished,” Bedore added. “Leveraging local artists and their very real need for paying jobs, the project becomes a marketing spectacle (a win for the developer) loaded with baggage (gentrification, city erasure, the role of public art, the developer’s background, affordability, etc.).”
Muralist Rhys Meatyard, who moved to St. Pete in the late-1980s, sees this moment as part of a longer arc of change. Downtown, once cheaper and rougher around the edges, has steadily polished itself into a destination—at the cost of its residents.
“It’s the gentrification of art,” Meatyard said. “The commodification of creativity.”
He does not fault artists who participated in the flash mob or in the pink paint, noting that steady work can be difficult to find, especially amid arts funding cuts. Still, he questions the broader dynamic of using public art as branding for developments many artists cannot afford to inhabit.
“It feels like we’re being exploited,” he said. “The art community has a lot of credit for bringing the city into its renaissance—and now we are being forced out.”
The promise to preserve select murals inside the new high-rise does not fully reassure him.
“It feels like this artificial pastiche of the community that they’re destroying,” he said. “None of us are going to actually live there.”
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This article appears in Mar. 05 – 11, 2026.