THERE IS AN ONGOING EFFORT TO PREPARE FOR GROWTH
Wheeler Street Station is the planned development at the intersection of Wheeler Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The vision is for the downtown development to be a mixed-use building with 16,000 square feet of commercial space on the first floor and one-bedroom apartments on the second and third floors, and two-bedroom apartments on the fourth floor. The developer, IDP Plant City Midtown, put the plan together in 2022.
The parcel of land designated for Wheeler Street Station sits in Plant City’s Midtown, which is in its Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). This area was specified after Florida’s Community Redevelopment Act of 1969. The purpose of the Community Redevelopment Act is to remove slum and blight from municipalities. The City Commission defined and established the area in Plant City in 1981.
Since 1991, the City has completed much infrastructure work in the CRA. The land acquired by the city in Midtown was a CRA project. The CRA funded road work, sewer and water infrastructure, and other projects. Even though this infrastructure is in place for Wheeler Street Station, the development has not come to fruition due to the economy.
“We can’t control the market,” Carter Broun, IDP Vice President of Development said. “We don’t control interest rates. Insurance rates are up 30 to 40 percent, particularly in Florida. Construction costs have increased. At the end of the day, a development has to make sense financially. With interest rates coming down, it makes Wheeler Street and Midtown much more viable projects. Conditions have to be feasible, and right now they are not.”
In the meantime, the City of Plant City is getting things into place for the Wheeler Street Station Project, and for others. There is a whole initiative to add residential and commercial spaces throughout Midtown. “We did buy a lot for additional parking, and then we ground leased it back to Wheeler Street Station for that project—which is an example of where the city is working to encourage development,” Bill McDaniel, City Manager of Plant City said. “We had to help solve the problem for the additional parking that would be created.”
There is an empty building across the street from the Wheeler Street Station location that at one time functioned as a bank. “That is a building that, quite honestly, we hope that we see somebody buy it and reactivate it,” McDaniel commented. ”It would make a great corporate office. We would just like to see it brought back to viability and have a business in it. If you had somebody in there that had 50 to 75 employees in that building, that is all positive for downtown. That particular property has plenty of its own parking, and it is also adjoined by quite a bit of public parking on Southwest Drane Street. So that building, as far as parking goes, is pretty well self-contained.”
Now that parking is in place for Wheeler Street Station, and there are plans for new national economic initiatives, if interest rates drop, it could be Plant Citians will see Midtown begin to flourish.
