I hadn’t really thought of it until Mitch Perry mentioned it. Perry, a wired-in, political junkie-blogger with a weekly radio talk show on WMNF, had just noted off-handedly on-air the inordinate publicity that seems to accompany anything that Jeff Vinik does or says.
He asked what I thought–after citing the Vinik-prompted, page-one, above-the-fold story in that morning’s Tampa Bay Times. Vinik, it was reported, was thinking about including some smaller-sized apartments among the residential units planned in the first phase of his 3 million square feet of development around Amalie Arena. Flexibility in the marketplace, to be sure, but hardly headline stuff.
I thought he had a valid point. I also thought it said a lot about the unique, hybrid market that is not only Tampa Bay–but specifically Tampa. As much as we need to think regionally, we still can be parochial and personal when it comes to our towns.
Tampa has one of the biggest ports in the country and a world-class airport. It has two major sports franchises and has hosted multiple Super Bowls and a Stanley Cup parade. It’s the hub of a major media market.
But it’s also had an embarrassingly dead downtown, an incongruously industrial river and a municipal reputation as a lap-dance hotbed. Call it the Tampa complex. It fades, but it doesn’t vanish overnight.
Vinik, the wealthy, Boston-based hedge-fund manager, hit Tampa as downtown was beginning to reinvent itself with museums, Curtis Hixon Park, a reinvigorated Riverwalk and a “can do” mentality. He bought the Lightning in 2010–but also bought into Tampa’s untapped potential. “Judge me over time,” he said then.
We have.
He relocated here, fronted his own money to renovate the arena, became philanthropically vested and then unveiled his 10-figure, “live, work, play, stay” project on 40 strategic acres. He has partnered with Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment fund, brought in USF’s medical school as an anchor and established himself as Tampa’s go-to rainmaker for “new urbanism.”
Vinik’s been a much needed infusion of vision, capital and self-confidence. Just ask Mayor Bob Buckhorn, who’s never met a millennial-employing-residing scenario he couldn’t salivate over. It’s validation for those who knew that downtown was more than a Potemkin Village of Maas Brothers nostalgia and surface parking lots.
And that’s how you make headlines without making news.