The soul of St. Pete is on the line, and only one Tropicana Field developer’s proposal is most worth considering

Which is worse: the flagrant injustice committed in a prior century’s ignorance or continued inequity today, softened by the healing language of acknowledgement and repair? How does a city manage to honor its history while repeating its worst past? These questions run through my head as I slog through the four Tropicana Field proposals, under public response and decision by St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch this January.

We know the story. Jim Crow segregation kept the city’s Black population to close quarters after the 1930s. African-Americans resented the official and unofficial redlining, fought back, and forged community within segregated spaces. Pernicious urban planning leveled those spaces. Interstate-175 mowed down Sugar Hill, the homes of leading Black families along what used to be Fifth Avenue South, in the 1970s.

Ten years later, the city razed the Gas Plant, bulldozing businesses (including the Welch family’s woodlot), at least nine churches, and a total of 295 buildings. Families displaced, congregations lost, homes destroyed—all for a baseball team that did not yet exist.

Black leaders rightly felt betrayed. David Welch, then a city councilman and the current mayor’s father, summed up the outrage: “When you went into this area and moved out all the people, you said you were going to rehabilitate [and] create jobs. You have a moral obligation to those individuals who were moved out for what you have told them.”

Now, in a plot torn from the pages of an airport novel, Welch’s son decides the Gas Plant‘s future. A press release from the city says Welch “plans to
make a major announcement” about the development at his State of the City address on Jan. 30

The mayor will choose from one of the four proposals for the Tropicana Field site, the 86 acres surrounding what still is (let’s be clear) a functional stadium. The proposals vary in scale and scope, though follow the same format—representing some collaboration of real estate developers, stadium designers, community players, and super-wealthy investors. As Raymond James exec Tom Mullins observes in a Tampa Bay Times column, neither Welch nor his predecessor Rick Kriseman “have thoroughly explained why they are so fixated on using a ‘master developer’ at all,” and the financial windfall for restoring the site’s troubled past should raise suspicions. If the free market is opportunistic, reptilian by nature, why trust developers to fill this “moral obligation”?

With the revised Request for Proposals, Ken Welch promises “inclusive progress” and “equitable development”; emphasis on affordable housing, whether on site or off; “clarity” (missing from the prior RFP) on a “state of the art baseball stadium”; and recognition for “the history and legacy of the Gas Plant community,” including the former cemeteries under the stadium’s Parking Lot 1 (Oaklawn) and I-175 interchange. Recognizing the need to “get it right,” he rightly sees this decision as a referendum on the city’s soul, with repercussions “for generations to come.”

All good. But the corporate team that works these “guiding principles” also stands to make a staggering profit. Expect prevarication. The scale of the four reports overwhelm all but the most obsessed citizen, totaling more than 843 pages; as a former city council member reminds me, St. Pete has a bad habit of falling for pretty pictures without weighing the grainy details.

The lies are nationwide. Ask 10 sports economists whether municipalities should fund sports venues and nine of them will say “no.” As the Columbia Journalism Review cautions, politicians (who are loathe to lose a sports franchise) will collude with the media (loathe to lose daily content) to frame stadium construction as a public good.

I have nothing to gain from this decision, I am a 20-year (white) resident of St. Pete who is conscious of the history, and I have slogged through the PDF proposals, knowing few others will. So here’s my take.

Gas Plant District Restoration Associates (GPD-RA) is a local consortium, including cardiologist turned hotelier (and Times investor) Dr. Kiran Patel, Invictus for housing, and mini-storage magnate Steve Freedman. The GPD-RA might be described as a “not the Rays” option, and much of the plan makes sense, including an idea to start with multimodal transportation. The bracing attention to public funding leads them to two options: (1) the Rays pony up for a new stadium; or (2) a $600 million renovation of the existing Trop, through a portfolio of public sources and private contributions.

The group is strong on the problem, short on viable solutions. “Based on history,” GPD-RA maintains, taxpayers will be “apprehensive” of governments across the Bay who cater “to out-of-town development entities [not] attuned to the local marketplace, propose unfunded plans and then are no longer present to live with the consequences.” So what’s the solution? A $450 million, gleaming, glass tower hotel. And mini-storage! A self-storage facility that exudes “personality and vibrancy,” which their rendering plops over former Oaklawn Cemetery. The city has called for sensitivity to the past, while I’m having visions of Poltergeist. This plan is dead on arrival.

Fifty Plus One Sports more than checks the boxes for diversity, with a minority-led team fronted by the Coral Gables developer Monti Valrie. The group has retained Congressman Kendrick Meek as an advisor, and includes a collaboration between AECOM (known for St. Pete’s Waterfront Master Plan) and the Latino-owned Garcia Associates, a Missouri-based firm that designed Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

The group promises 50% affordable-workforce housing, built on land leased from the city. The proposal puts the diversity of its collaborators first, and this proposal probably delivers the best chance of achieving the city’s goal of “inclusive development.” The design proposes a stadium nestled against Booker Creek, with a super-cool looking “spectral canopy” and curvy colonnade. (I break my own rule here of falling for pictures!) The financial breakdown also puts an emphasis on viability.

Missing from this proposal, which runs on the short side, is any sense of the site’s past. The Fifty Plus One makes requisite nods to walkability, neighborhood economy and Booker Creek as a community space. But it offers little explanation why this particular site is unique. Without a deep knowledge or incorporation of the local past, the development could be anywhere. St. Petersburg, perhaps, but just as well Kansas City.

Hines & Tampa Bay Rays is predictably about a ballpark. The word itself, “ballpark,” appears 148 times in this carefully constructed proposal (three times that of the Sugar Hill proposal, below). On the proposal’s first page, the stadium sits like a jewel amidst the creek and mixed-use development.

Sports is the solution: “We aim to provide a sports and entertainment venue nestled within a mixed community, as well as to reintegrate, restore, and implement growth potential for the African American community that comprised the former Gas Plant neighborhood.” To reach their aim, the group has assembled a tremendously capable team, including Kimley-Horn, the civil engineers behind the (now cracking) St. Pete Pier; Walter Hood, who worked on the previous Midtown proposal; Dantes Partners real estate developers; and the stadium designers Populous, who are responsible for ballparks across the country, including Truist Park+The Battery, the Braves’ new development in suburban Atlanta.

A “centerpiece for the neighborhood,” the Rays-Hines group writes, this stadium looks to run between $2.5-$3 billion. The stadium is the first thing on their minds, and in Phase I will be the first thing built. A fixed roof venue will seat 30,000 and feature “distinctive overhangs, generous canopies, stacked outdoor terraces, and winding brise-soleils” (louvers to block sunlight, I had to look it up, too). Nowhere in the 245-page document does Rays-Hines explain who will pay for this “generous” outlay. The proposal instead focuses on jobs and economic impacts– discredited bullshit claims, a UC Berkeley paper notes, that are “rooted on questionable economic ideals and intimidation of local residents.”

To convince the city that a neighborhood should be designed around baseball, the Rays make an artful case. Local griot Gwendolyn Reese ensures the area’s history will be remembered. The plan for Booker Creek also enlists the shop of MacArthur “genius” Walter Hood, who frames this flood-prone waterway as a living entity, not simply as a landscape feature. In the later moments, team leaders have hosted former Gas Plant residents at the Trop for food and conversation.

The Rays are straightforward about what they want. “They are primarily a business venture,” Andrew Walker, who grew up in a home razed for I-175, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. The organization has been “forthcoming and upfront that they are a business organization who inherited” the history, and while they recognize the past, their priority is baseball.

The plan accordingly devotes more energy to “extending the gameday experience” than building a working community. Rays-Hines leans heavily on “offsite” housing, moving affordable options on this future site elsewhere. The exchange, akin to environmental mitigation, would leverage the financial outlay and makes sense from a strictly cost-benefit perspective. But what about St. Petersburg’s history of segregation? USF public policy professor Elizabeth Strom asks: would offsite units be close to amenities and economic centers, or placed in areas with far poorer infrastructure? The city’s hundred year history overwhelmingly suggests the latter.

“Baseball is not the best path to inclusivity.”

Rather than pulling a city together, the plan would deepen divides. MLB fans, the Atlantic reports, are 83% white (mostly older men). An offsite strategy caters to these white fans, folks who would not venture south of St. Pete’s Central Ave. in the past, whom the Rays anticipate patronizing their future ballpark.

Twenty-two letters of community support, from CASA to Kahwa Coffee, testify to the team’s solid record of corporate citizenry. Few of these letters adequately explain the need for a multi-billion dollar stadium.

Here’s the problem with the carefully crafted and aggressively marketed Rays-Hines proposal. It’s wrong.

Baseball is not the best path to inclusivity. For an example, drive the seven hours up Interstate-75. In 2017 the Atlanta Braves moved from their 20-year home at Turner Field, in mostly Black south Atlanta, to wealthier and whiter Cobb County, a northern suburb famous for rejecting city transit connections and for right-wing troll Newt Gingrich. The Rays-Hines plan cites the new stadium, Truist Park+The Battery as a reference project. The national media cite the Braves’ move to Cobb County, however, as the antithesis of inclusivity. The Battery “evokes a theme park, a bubble floating free of the city around it,” Sports Illustrated reports, “akin to the purposely isolated enclaves the white flight generation carved out decades ago.” (This trajectory paints a big frown on the Rays-Hines proposal to shuffle affordable housing offsite.) Princeton University professor Kevin Kruse, who wrote the book about race and metro Atlanta, calls the Braves’ relocation “the culmination of white flight.”

Sugar Hill Community Partners, by contrast, provides the best single chance for building authentic community. Composed mostly from partners in the previous round of proposals, Sugar Hill includes JMA Ventures/Machete Group (which includes NBA all-star and former Mayor of Sacramento Kevin Johnson), a constellation of architects (with locals Behar + Peteranecz), Stantec, and public housing developers Blue Sky partners. After wincing through a long justification of “gameday experience” and stadium expenditure, Sugar Hill’s opening description feels refreshing: “a rare opportunity to deliver an inclusive, sustainable urban neighborhood that is a catalyst for job and wealth creation and economic growth,” with emphasis upon “empowerment, inspiration, and enrichment that lifts up all of St. Pete.” The past guides the future in this thoroughly thought-through proposal; “Delivering anything less will fall short of the true promise of the Gas Plant site.”

There is both short- and long-term history here. Mayor Welch had hoped the Rays and Sugar Hill would collaborate but the partnership did not pan out. The Rays and Sugar Hill parted ways, as a city council member put it; far more likely, the Rays cut Sugar Hill out, claiming they lacked stadium building experience. As the proposals indicate, the Rays hold vastly different ideas for the site.

The Sugar Hill team actually has experience with New York’s CitiField and Kevin Johnson’s baby, the Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center, which was completed with a minimum of social tear associated with such projects. Their renderings present a big oval gap where a stadium could go, along the east side of the eastern side of Booker Creek, and the pointed criticism of building a community around a ballpark is compelling: “early examples of mixed-use, stadium-anchored projects made the mistake of creating master plans that located the public assembly at the heart of the project, a sun at the middle of a mixed-use solar system.” I’ve traveled quite a bit, and personally, have never been to a sports venue that was not also a neighborhood suck.

Sugar Hill starts with the street layout. Despite a call to restore the prior grid, none of these four plans look to improve north-south circulation (essential for healing St. Petersburg’s racial divide), though Sugar Hill makes a first step with a commitment to rebuilding adjacent Campbell Park, now cut off by the Interstate. The housing plan, which includes well-regarded Blue Sky Communities, offers at least the potential to bring some badly-needed income diversity to the downtown core. Much of the plan still sounds pretty corporate: a “business hotel,” 750,000 square feet of office space, and reduced-scale conference center (please no, a convention center is classic boondoggle). And housing promises are impossibly complex, but in terms of inclusive development as well as honoring the past, the Sugar Hill proposal carries the most promise.

“In terms of meeting the principles, not profit, the bid should go to Sugar Hill.”

The rendering showing the historic cemeteries, buried under the current Trop’s Parking Lot 1 and I-175 exchange, reflects a more thoughtful design. Distinct from the three other proposals, the Sugar Hill group suggests a park over what used to be Oaklawn Cemetery. A Museum of African American Heritage fronts the park, running east-west and backing against the interstate overpass—but as an internal museum sheltered from the road noise. The park and museum would intersect with an African American heritage trail, which threads throughout the district. Where the Rays “extend the game day experience” and move a city’s housing problem offsite, the Sugar Hill plan weaves past and present into a convincing, workable design.

In terms of meeting the principles, not profit, the bid should go to Sugar Hill.

A fifth choice is none at all, why let a third party capitalize on a city’s single greatest financial asset? If the Rays cry foul, let the franchise use the blank space set aside by Sugar Hill. Or finally, trust our Solomon to split this 86-acre baby in half. Relinquish the west side to the Rays (where they can build a stadium or do whatever they want), develop the eastern portion to meet the city’s pressing needs, and split the middle with a signature park, designed by Walter Hood.

St. Petersburg has a bad history with sucker’s bargains. The best decision uses profit to drive what our city needs. The moment we mistake profit (which includes professional sports) for civic good, we lose. Mayor Ken Welch has a family tie to the Gas Plant’s history and an accountant’s eye for numbers. There are few people I trust more, in this position, to not lose our connection to the past, this return on a bad check, our public good … our soul.

This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2023.