Brian Maughan: “So just really quick, if we were standing at this exact spot prior to water street, the project being developed, what would I have seen?” - Brian

Brad Cooke: “You would have seen the arena and everything else would have been blank surface parking lots. Yep.  A Sea of parking lots.“

Brian Maughan: “Wow”

BRIAN MAUGHAN:  This is BUILT, the podcast where you’ll meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they make a difference.

I’m your host Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer with Fidelity National Financial. In our Sixth season of BUILT, we’re taking a closer look at where commercial real estate protects, enhances, and even interacts with nature.  

In this episode, we are visiting a transformative urban development project located in the heart of Tampa, Florida. The development also prioritizes connectivity and the well-being of its residents, with pedestrian-friendly pathways, bike lanes, and waterfront access, encouraging outdoor activities and social interaction.

Water Street Tampa represents a significant leap forward in urban planning, aiming to create a dynamic and sustainable environment that serves as a model for future developments.

I had the pleasure of speaking with two individuals who were instrumental in guiding the entire project. Josh Taube and Brad Cooke.

Here’s Josh.

Josh: I'm the CEO of SPP, which is the developer of Water Street here in lovely Tampa, Florida. And I came onto this project and actually it's inception end of 2013 when the company had been formed and entered a big planning process. And then, flash forward to today and we built a city.

Brian: Awesome. Very Good. Brad?

Brad: Brad Cooke, I'm Executive Vice President of Development here at Strategic Property Partners. And I lead our development team. I joined the company in 2019 as the projects were just starting to break ground. And so it was there to kind of finishing out the first phase of development and been active in the next phase of planning for Water Street, Tampa, and also have been working really closely with Josh on, thinking through where we're headed next outside of Tampa.

Brian: So give me a little bit of your origin story, Josh, where did you grow up? How did you get into commercial real estate? Give me a little bit of the play by play.

Josh: I grew up in Ithaca, New York. central New York. I graduated from Cornell University, which is right in my backyard. And then I moved to Seattle, Washington, And then, started my, career two years later. I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey. And started my career in real estate through a public finance shop there. And then was in New York area until 2005 and then moved down to Florida.

I have three daughters, two were born there and for 10 years was with the REIT platform, CNL, and we were involved in a lot of institutional real estate, a lot of lodging, hotel, senior housing, medical office, a big platform, and then got the opportunity to get Come down I 4 to Tampa because of  this partnership that had been created to that ultimately built Water Street.

Brian: Awesome. Very good. Brad, how about you?

Brad: So, I'm a bit of a boomerang story. I grew up here in Tampa. I left in 2004 for college and said I'm never coming back. Moved to St. Louis for grad school and then began my career in New York City. Worked there for about seven years. In the meantime, Tampa had changed a lot, wanted to go back home, lay down some roots, so my wife and I chose to move back to Tampa, ended up getting connected with the SPP team, learning about what they were doing.

And then had an opportunity to join the company and it was too good of a deal to pass up to work on this project in my backyard. And so I haven't really looked back since. It's been great to be part of this transformational project in my hometown.

Brian Narration: The formation of Strategic Property Partners made this hometown project possible.

Josh: So Bill Gates family office and Jeff Vinick, who bought the Tampa Lightning, the hockey team in 2010. And then he embarked on a preliminary planning effort and realized that this was going to be a very big project even for somebody with his means and then ultimately partnered with Cascade and then the newly formed company just embarked on finding a CEO, somebody to build the company.

Josh: And that was James Nozar, somebody had been with JBG, big real estate developer. in DC and ultimately brought him in and said, we're going to form company. And we ultimately scaled to during that planning process and then execution to 70 employees.You could have done that internally or externally. We willfully did it for better or worse as creating the company and having everyone in house to do those efforts. So now the company today, now that this first phase.10 buildings, four and a half million square feet's done. We're at 35 employees, and you're probably more steady state than where we were.

Brian: What makes SPP unique? Is it The project itself. Is it the partnership? Is it the fact that you brought people in house and created this in internal team as opposed to partnering with third parties?

Brad: There's not a lot of companies that have tackled these huge mixed-use projects and done it successfully. There's a lot of things you'll find that are in planning that look great, but you know, we're proud that we've completed 5 million square feet of some of the best mixed-use development in the country.

The organization structure is unique and now we have this platform that we can go and replicate and do in other places, which we're looking for opportunities now. We're only halfway through the first phase. And the other thing is what's unique is the site opportunity.

It's really rare that you get this much land in the middle of an urban core. Water Street at its totality is a 56 acre site and if you were to look on a map, it's in the heart of downtown Tampa. not to mention along the waterfront in the core of a city that has really nothing on it.

Brad: We didn't have to displace anyone. It was really, dilapidated, post industrial landscape that was an active industrial waterfront that really, had fallen away and it was just vacant surface parking lots that were supporting the arena.

Brian Narration: The transformation from that nothingness to what’s here now is incredible.

Brad: We've got three hotels: from the Marriott to the JW to the addition, which is Tampa's first five star hotel. We have three multifamily buildings, we have about 1300 units. There really wasn't much multifamily downtown. We built the first high-rise office building in downtown Tampa since the 90s and that's 80, over 85 percent leased up today, and we built 200,000 square feet of retail.

Josh: Yeah, I mean, we're located adjacent to the central business district, just south of it, southeast. Like Brad said, we're really in an arena district that's a very busy arena. One of the most active arenas in the country actually behind Madison Square Garden and Barclays Center. That said there wasn't much here and so now what you would see is we've developed ten buildings, four and a half, five million square feet of new development that largely went up during COVID, which is a very interesting time because here these buildings are going up and even locals in Tampa that may live in more suburban markets.

And they came down here and said, What happened? A city was built during this pandemic. A lot of these exciting things.

Brian Narration: Brad gave us a little history of the area to add more context. Tampa used to be an old fishing village that was developed with the addition of railroads.

The development of Tampa’s urban core that we see today ,well that occurred in the ‘80s and ‘90s and was significantly influenced by the arrival of the hockey team.

Brad: And so that was really the context of, this gap in downtown between what had evolved as the central business district and this kind of vacant area around the arena.

Brian Narration: I took a tour of Water Street Tampa with Brad to see what they built during Covid.

“One of the things we did, tore down a quarter of the building and open it up to the waterfront here. You can see the water beyond going back to that idea of connecting the neighborhood more to the water. So built this outdoor container park that's got a lot of local food purveyors.

And then we've got a big active outdoor lawn where you can take your food and drinks and set out on the lawn and be right on the water.” - Brad Water Street Tour

Brian: Josh, I wonder if you could go back for me into 2013 when you joined the organization and you see the vision or you start to describe this vision to a larger group, was it hard to see or was it easy to see what Water Street could become?

Josh: You know, I think I'd be lying if I said it was easy to see. I think, any really impactful project they're going to feel uncomfortable, but being around very visionary people and investors, I think you saw the willpower that they had and that was really what helped get people on board.

Josh: But at the onset, it's not that anyone knew exactly what they were going to do. They really bought into the market and a belief that Tampa had the great bones and the foundation that would enable a project like this to be successful.

Brad: You can't overstate the importance of the ownership. If you were to ask people that were in Tampa that knew this area before where this project was, there's been dozens of development plans announced. It really took that, the horsepower of the ownership to really make it happen.

Brian: I'm interested in the fact that it's not only such a unique location and it's been around for a while. It wasn't like it was fertile, new, ground, white field, if you will.  You had to transform this. The goal to build these interactions with the public, the visitors with nature, with something that I think Tampa has, which is beautiful waterfront, wonderful weather.

So tell me a little bit about from a design perspective, maybe some considerations that you see, Brad, from this is different than just constructing vertical buildings. This is much bigger than that. But initially, what makes it unique from a design perspective?

Brad: That was something that was really fun and a challenge, to work through because of the largely blank slate nature of it. But the things we did have to respond to were a waterfront that we wanted to make stronger connections to. We wanted to connect what had been disconnected parts of the city, and it was acknowledged that all the infrastructure was completely outdated.

Brian Narration: The team worked with the City of Tampa to address long-term problems.

Brad: We had a broken road grid. We had broken utility infrastructure. So we really were able to start from scratch and because we weren't doing just one project at a time and we were thinking about the whole thing, we engaged the best kind of planners and landscape architects in the country to really re-envision what does an ideal urban form look like. And so we're able to do really unique things like redefine a street grid, which doesn't sound like much, but it allows you to say what are the ideal block sizes?

A lot of cities can't really change that. What is the ideal sidewalk width? And you're able to do things like size the sidewalks in a way that allows you to have ample shade and double rows of trees and things that are really hard to do when you're in a city and your lot line is five feet away from the road.

 And so that allowed us to think from scratch  on what is the ideal urban form and how can we do it in a way that makes this a place that people really want to be.

Brian Narration: Though they found this freedom empowering, Josh and the rest of the team faced challenges executing the build.

Josh: Probably the most challenging part of this process was the unlimited possibilities of what you could do. If you have a gas station next door that you just can't do anything with, it's there. You have to respond to it.

Josh: But what it's going to do is limit the options for your planning, for the adjacent land. I think that was one of the tough things where you have people feel the responsibility and want to do the best they possibly can by investors, by the city and the region. And you can overthink things. And at some point, you can measure as many times as you want, but you have to cut.

Brad: You could start getting into weird things where you're like, we could have unlimited public space and it could look like this, and that's why you really lean on your experts and collaboration to figure out, a lot of times actually more public space is not better.

Brad: We wanted enough space so that you could have outdoor retail and F&B spill out onto the sidewalk, but you don't want it so wide that it feels vacant and dead.

And so I think we've struck a really great balance here and. One of the most rewarding things for us was when the first phase was open and the buildings were beautiful. We're proud of the buildings, but seeing the street life and active and the energy and that's really what's that like our special sauce at the end of the day is these neighborhoods feeling alive and vibrant.

And I think we did a pretty good job with that.

“You see all this outdoor cafe seating. That's a really big part off the urban design.We wanted the indoor life to spill outside. You've got this collision, you've got people over here, you've got people walking through here. And so, each retailer gets their own dedicated outdoor space that is included. In their premises. And so they can put their own cafe seating out there, tables, chairs, umbrellas, signage.

And so if you're here tonight, you'd see all of these tables and chairs full and people really enjoying themselves.” - Brad Water Street Tour

“This is Raybon Plaza. This is one of our bigger kind of park spaces and what you're seeing. It's technically called a runnel, but you've got this shallow water feature that's running throughout the park. And it's, the inspiration for the designer was Florida's aquifer system. So you've got water, it's bubbling up in places, it's creating a visual effect, there's sound, and then it's, eventually dumping back down into this central rain garden.

And so you can see beautiful, landscaped bed, but when there's Heavy rain pour. That's all dumping into this kind of rain garden. And it's designed in a way that the plants are meant to be inundated with water. They thrive when they're flooded. And so you've got this ecosystem that's not only attractive, but it's also practical.” - Brad Water Street Tampa Tour

Brian Narration: Water Street Tampa was designed to connect locals to nature. As the old adage says “Location, location, location”

Brad: One thing that Tampa did that was really great, as it was, redeveloping the waterfront over the past 20 or 30 years is, It started to create this idea of this, river walk that wraps around the west side of downtown all the way down around the south where we are and up to the east.

The goal of Water Street was always to tie ourselves more strongly to the waterfront. And so we were able to weave that riverwalk path more integrally into the neighborhood and also connect the street grid in a way that oriented people more closely towards the water.

So just physically and visually connecting people with the water was huge. The landscape was designed in a way. to promote people's comfort and connection to nature.

And Water Street, which is our main street, has, on the east side, a wide 45 foot sidewalk. And it's got two rows of live oak trees, which are, a native Florida species. and we bought these, pretty much as large of caliper of tree that you could buy from the nursery so that from day one, you'd have a shaded canopy that provides, outdoor comfort for people.

Brad: And we've also thought about integration and in nature in a very practical way. A lot of our planter beds, are beautiful, but they're also practical. A lot of the storm water runs off into those planter beds and naturally filters back down into the aquifer rather than, total hardscape that overwhelms and overflows into the city stormwater, which ultimately gets dirty and dumps into the river. We've been pretty progressive in the way we've thought about, connecting to nature and that way as well.

“We're approaching the corner of Water Street and Channel Side. So this is kind of the heart.” (Brian)

“And you're seeing in the distance there, the arena where the lightning play.  If you're looking to the left, you're looking south, you're seeing down to the waterfront and the history center.

And so now you can get a picture of that wide sidewalk. And you see this, the row of live oak trees here. And you look north, and now you can see that 45 foot wide sidewalk section. You've got two rows.  of mature live oak trees. And you can already see that canopy starting to fill in. So you're almost completely shaded as you walk north along water street.” (9:20 - 9:55) , Brad Water Street Tampa Tour

Brian Narration: Water Street Tampa is the first WELL Pre-certified Community in the world, under the WELL Community Standard, pioneered by the International Well Building Institute. And they also achieved LEED silver certification under the Neighborhood Development category.

Brad: A lot of your listeners will be familiar with the LEED building standard. For those of you who are not, LEED is a rating system that measures buildings performance and sustainability. So it's sustainable materials, it's using lower energy,it's really focused on the performance and sustainability of buildings.

The WELL standard is a new standard that was created that uses similar,scientifically measured benchmarks, but all the benchmarks pertain to people's health and well being rather than the building's performance and sustainability. And we committed to the well building standard and the well community standard early on and at the outset of the project.

And things that, specifically, means are, access to light and air more than you normally would have. a lot of our buildings, have huge windows, operable windows, ways to physically engage with the outdoors.

So we measure noise levels and we report to tenants about the noise levels in the neighborhood. It has to do with the lighting of the buildings and they're all coordinated in a way that corresponds to people's circadian rhythm. So our streetlights. are all integrated, and they dim in the evenings, trying to get back to this kind of more natural cycles.

Building standard also pertains to air quality. healthy eating, we had to have a grocery store which sold health products and healthy food, it's things you can measure that tangibly improve people's health and well being.

Josh: Fortunately we've moved in a direction that I do think end consumers, users, tenants are. increasingly placing value on those things that I think traditional developers would have had bigger problems with, just from an economic standpoint, which is refreshing because we leaned into it and grew into it from an economic case.

Brian Narration: Projects of this magnitude often generate an array of opinions, with key players frequently seeking to pursue different directions. But that wasn’t the case here.

Josh: We are in a unique situation here and fortunate for us and for the whole region. Everybody seemed to see the vision.

Brad: And I think it's been so refreshing working in Tampa. The lack of bureaucracy here and the general alignment with the city, I can't overstate how critical that's been that they were on board with the vision from the beginning.

And so all of the coordination meetings, all of the infrastructure coordination, all of the reviews and the roadway, what, It was acknowledged, hey, we're trying to do the same thing, and private sector, you all do what you're best at, and we'll support along the way, and the collaboration with the city has been, amazing.

It's really helped the success of the project.

“So we were thinking about sidewalks for people, roads the right size for cars and speed. And then we also thought about cycling connectivity. So what you're seeing here in front of you is a two way protected cycle track protected being that there's a curve that actively separates you from the roadway traffic and that cycle track connects into The meridian greenway trail and the river walk.

And then it connects all the way if you look to the left west back to the central business district. And so that was a big element, not only creating this new roadway connection, this was actually the first roadway south of Jackson, which is blocks of the north to connect from the east side of downtown all the way to the west.

So created this connection not only for cars, but also for cyclists as well.” Brad - Water Street Tampa Tour

Brad: There's an abandoned little rail spur that ran along the East side of the project that we hadn't always had a plan for.

We approached the expressway authority about hey, can we turn this into a linear park? It's not very wide But it'd be a great way to connect it actually connects the riverwalk into a sidewalk that goes all the way up to Ybor City And so for two blocks, it varies in width from about 20 feet at the narrowest about 50 feet But we created this amazing little trail that The feeling is very different from our main street, which is polished and buttoned up.

And this space recognizes the industrial heritage. so it's got core 10 steel and more angular forms. And then the landscape is a little bit more raw. but it's a really cool walk. And then we were able to plug in, a little dog run, a little seating area and a connection to a bike room.

so that's a space I really personally love. and long term, we want to make that an even stronger, keep that going all the way up to Ybor City.

“Here's this little pop up dog park. To that conversation of what's missing.  So many of our residents have dogs. I can't remember the exact percentage, but we've got  hundreds of dogs in the neighborhood. And so outlets for the dogs, they wreak havoc on the plant. So it's a practical thing to have a place where they can go and run and relieve themselves.

But it also makes for a fun, you know, engaging thing on the street. Usually there's people having their dogs run and play and meeting their neighbors” - Brad, Water Street Tampa Tour

Brian Narration: As temperatures soar in the Florida heat, the team has established a sustainable cooling system to ensure comfortable conditions for residents.

Brad: In the most simple terms, we built a chiller plant that makes ice at night, and it melts during the day. And the cold water from that ice is pumped to all the buildings, and that cold water is the primary means of cooling the buildings. What that means for the buildings is that they have less Equipment on the buildings as you normally would have and that frees up space on the buildings to do things with outdoor spaces on roofs like pool decks Outdoor terraces and things like that.

Brian: So as you were laying out the perfect grid and the perfect street width, or sidewalk width, you also said, Hey, let's build this thing called the cooling district and. Make some ice, let it melt, cool the buildings.

Brad: Exactly.

“When we get to the end of water street at Cumberland, we'll look to the West and you'll see the district cooling plant and most people think that's an old building because it's brick and it's fairly nondescript and it looks like it's been there for a while.

That's where the chillers and ice plant is for the neighborhood. So underground there's a network of insulated chilled water lines that run all the way back to that district cooling plant.

And there's just a certain threshold of maximum efficiency of how much effort it takes to pump the water and what's the ideal temperature for blowing the air over it in the unit.

But the tangible result is we freed up a lot of the space in the buildings from equipment, which it otherwise would have required.” - Brad Water Street Tampa Tour

Brian Narration: The first phase of Water Street Tampa is a significant achievement. However, there is much to anticipate in the plans for Phase 2.

Josh: We always knew they'd be part of the program, but I'm just excited to see some of these new, very interesting kind of retailers, some national, some here, some regional, but just to diversify the mix and make the experience a little bit more holistic.

Brad: The first phase is 5 million square feet and we've built our way starting from the water and we're working our way north. And so we don't know exactly what all the additional kind of buildings are going to be. but we know there's likely to be another 5 million square feet.

And, we've built out on about 10 of the pads for development. We have another 10 pads to go. So it's easy to see how we're set up about halfway there. we're not going to build another 10 buildings at once. We had to do so much at once because there was really nothing here and we had to create a sense of place, but the next phase will happen in a way that are both reactive to where the market is, but reactive to what the needs of the community is.

And so we're able to respond real time because we still own all the assets. We can see what's doing well, what's not, what are people wanting more of less of. So the next phases will likely be two or three buildings at a time until we finish the project.

“And the good thing is the planning principles are set and so you're looking north now to the next phase and you can imagine this sidewalk extending for another six blocks that way. And that's the idea is this spine of Water Street continues north all the way again, six blocks up to those next buildings that you can see in the distance.

And, as Josh mentioned, the idea is this experience continues, but the retail mix evolves. We've got a lot of restaurants in this first phase, and they're generally more willing to take the risk in the next phase. You can imagine more hard goods, soft goods, retailers unfolding as you move north.” - Brad Water Street Tampa Tour

Brian Narration: It wasn't just the landscape that transformed; the entire team was evolving in the process. The lessons learned from this project prepared them for future endeavors.

Josh: I think the foundation of those learnings, along the way, and it's even as we reflect on company, we really were a fee developer for owners in a very unique circumstance. Now, I think everyone knew enough to say these opportunities aren't going to come.

They may be, once in a lifetime generational type opportunities. That said, in the process. People were very committed to the team and a team of consultants around us and taking those learnings and having those applications on new projects.

Brad's done a great job in Charleston applying all those same principles to get through a rezoning in a place like historic Charleston. That's not easy, but you're selling the same things that he was talking about. And it's how do you create these synapses of these experiences on the ground floor and amenities within that just people want to live and function in and play in.And I think those principles they filter through the whole organization and are in the DNA.

We had extremely talented people. that we're all part of the symphony of ultimately becoming a city. And you look back through time, there's going to be personalities, there's going to be, hard times, great times, wins, losses or things that feel like losses. And I think for them, for us, you look back and say we had such talented people who fit their role because it was all part of something.

Brian: Yeah, makes sense. I think it's interesting that so much of the United States, specifically some of these major cities that we grow to love and people around in their communities love, they're at the cusp of needing to be redeveloped, right? They've been around for a long time. Tampa is a great example.

You have this buildup in the 80s and 90s. There was growth until there wasn't, right? And then there was an opportunity, visionaries. I mean, there's some wonderful things that are happening.

The second life is going to be better than where it is right now. And so I find that interesting that, although you didn't develop a company to go outward, you developed a company specifically for the development.

Brian: You've got phase two and you've got about half still to build, but as you think about taking the principles you've learned and the approach that you've learned, and even the development company that you've created into other markets. What's been most exciting about that?

Brad: I know our team gets really excited about the complex infrastructure heavy projects because, that's where you can create the most value, like anybody can take, clean site, great location and build a great project. But like we really excel in connecting with the local stakeholders, the municipality, like what are their goals?

What are the challenges of the infrastructure and roll up your sleeves and get dirty figuring that stuff out. I think that's like where we really excel.

Josh: But I think just leveraging the energy of the activations. What do you do to create really vibrant locations where there's tons of activity? It's just places that people want to go have fun and really feel good about their world.

And we just want to continue to leverage that.

Brad: I would say the original vision was not like, let's build a development company so we can do this stuff all over the country. I think that's a benefit that's come out of the success that we've had and the realization that, wow, there's not many people who have done this before, and there's a need for this in other places.

And so we have a team that is hungry and excited about taking these skill sets to tackle their opportunities and we're doing a project in Charleston.

Brad: It's much smaller but as you mentioned it's the same thinking in the approach the importance of the public realm the importance of the landscape and the connection to the community which is ultimately why we've been successful there in getting approvals and what's a very challenging place to get approvals.

Brian Narration: Given that the needs of locals and visitors have been the cornerstone of this project, I had to ask one last question before I left.

Brian: What has been the response of the community?

Brad: I think the best way to measure that really is what does it feel like being out there? What's going on? I think generally people come here and they're like, I can't believe this exists in Tampa. And that's so rewarding to hear.

I think mixing all those things together has created a place where people want to be.

Brian: Build it and they will come. I know it's cliche, which probably said too often, but in reality, that's what comes to my mind because you described building this up during covid people returned from covid and they were like, what happened?

You built a city while we're away, right? And that's interesting. And then you mentioned developers really just want to see it. They're so visual. As a builder, one of the most satisfying things is the fact that, at the end of your day, something is there that wasn't there before.

And to me, what's amazing is how you've taken this space that was utilized before, but reinvented it into something completely different. And not being from here, it is a little bit hard to believe that this didn't always exist.

But Josh, thank you so much. Brad. Thank you as well.

Brad: Thank you.

Josh: Thank you. Thanks Brian.

Brian Narration: Thanks for tuning into Season Six of Built! Join us in two weeks on an extension of the T’s Green Line as we visit a new connected community in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Brian Narration:  If you haven't had the chance to catch the episodes from the first five seasons, be sure to take a listen! You can find all Built episodes wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy the show, share it with your friends and leave us a rating on your podcast app!

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode of Built was produced by Emmanuel Desarme. Our Senior Producer and editor is Genevieve Sponsler. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel.  

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Special thanks to Josh Taube and Brad Cooke from Strategic Property Partners. Also, thanks to Bill Bradley for audio support.

I’m Brian Maughan.

And remember, every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.