Publix is coming to Channel District in Tampa, and Mayor Bob Buckhorn couldn’t be more ecstatic.
“It really is a great day,” the mayor told reporters this morning before a ceremony marking World AIDS Day. “This really is the last piece of the puzzle down here, the last amenity that’s missing, and I think what you’re going to see now is a downtown that has taken on a life of its own, and is just really ready to explode.”
A building permit filed by a development group called Mercury Advisors on Tuesday calls for a two story grocery store with rooftop parking attached to a residential tower and parking garage at 1105 E Twiggs St. It is scheduled to open in the fall of 2017.
It’s been long time coming for the Channel/downtown area, where the closest major grocery store currently resides at Bayshore Boulevard, across the Hillsborough River from downtown Tampa.
In 2013, Publix decided against putting a store in Encore, the city backed redevelopment housing development at East Harrison Street and Central Avenue. In 2014, Wal-Mart met with Tampa Housing Authority officials about a possible store, but the two parties could not reach an agreement.
Buckhorn suggested that Publix has now calculated that there is enough housing in the Channelside area to justify the creation of a store there.
“If you look at all the development in the Channelside, Tampa Heights, in downtown, they’re going to knock it off the charts,” he said of the business potential for Publix. “It will bring something that is missing, for all the folks who are now living downtown, who have to get in their cars and drive to a Publix elsewhere, they now can walk, so our downtown now truly becomes a livable, walkable 18-hour a day environment where people can go to bars, they go to restaurants, they can go to work, they can walk to the grocery store and it really fills that niche that had been lacking.”
Channelside developer Jeff Vinik has also been emphatic that his team has also been looking to secure a grocery store in the area for his now $2 billion-dollar development.
