Mayor Castor on Tampa’s growth: ‘We’re creating entire neighborhoods.’

TAMPA — Mayor Jane Castor has watched her native city morph from a hodgepodge of sleepy sprawl into a millennial magnet and Sun Belt darling.

Her hand, she jokes, is starting to ache from all the ribbon cuttings.

“We have the opportunity to not just put up buildings here and there,” she told more than 300 business and community leaders huddled in the air-conditioned cool of the Tampa Marriott Water Street Tuesday morning. “We’re creating entire neighborhoods.”

After decades of promises that Tampa would emerge as America’s next great city, the moment finally feels like it has arrived.

The event on the state and future of Tampa’s downtown, was hosted by the Tampa Downtown Partnership, the nonprofit that manages the district through an agreement with the city.

Among the morning’s speakers, Darryl Shaw, the developer driving much of Tampa’s evolution, including Gas Worx, a new walkable community rising from land between the Ybor Historic District and the Channel District. The project is bringing some 5,000 new residences coming over the next decade along with 500,000 square feet of office space and 140,000 in retail.

What does he think Tampa’s urban core will look like in five to 10 years?

“Multiple interconnected, diverse neighborhoods that you can move between,” he told the crowd, not just with a car but on foot, by bike or trolley and light-rail.

“That’s really the key. We see that as being the nucleus,” said Shaw, also a co-owner of Tampa Bay’s new first-division professional women’s soccer team. “Ultimately, people need additional transit.”

Beyond the continued reliance on cars, sidelining a growing vulnerable population, the city faces a myriad of other challenges. Rainfall regularly swallows neighborhood streets. Residents fear rising rents will boot them from their longtime homes. Continued reliance on cars

And then there’s the problem bedeviling local governments nationwide: how to pay for city services at a time of limited funds and rising costs.

Castor, a former police chief currently in her second and final term as mayor, brushed over the work that remains, briefly nodding to the city’s barebones public transit offerings, and her desire to do more.

“We haven’t lost focus on that,” she told the crowd.