Tampa Bay, Florida is one of the twenty largest metropolitan areas in the United States made up of Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater. All, three are growing exponentially and house over 3.7M residents. Tampa is on the verge of a modernization makeover courtesy of Bill Gates and Jeff Vinik. The city’s downtown area, covering 53 acres of land will undergo a $3 billion redevelopment that is to create bold impacts to the waterfront neighborhood.
The massive Tampa Bay smart city project will be developed by Strategic Property Partners (SPP), which is a joint venture between Gates’s investment fund Cascade Investment LLP and Vinik, a local businessman who owns both the National Hockey League (NHL) team Tampa Bay Lightning as well as the Arena Football League team the Tampa Bay Storm.
Tampa’s Water Street Transformation
Located on Florida’s west coast on Tampa Bay, the city of Tampa has nearly 400,000 residents in its 175.22 square mile area. Soon, the long-dormant downtown will experience a change thanks to the combined efforts of Jeff Vinik, a big-thinking business man, with the help of an investment fund from world-famous billionaire Bill Gates, and many other collaborators.
Vinik is ambitious, envisioning a live-work-and-play environment within the mixed-use waterfront neighborhood. Dreaming big, he is using a combination of his business acumen, influence, and personal wealth in order to reinvent Tampa via the Water Street project.
