Developer Steve Freedman wants to give self-storage a whole new look and plans to do so in downtown Tampa, FL. He expects next week to close his purchase of the half-city block at 1221 N. Florida Ave. There’s a surface parking lot there, but Freedman’s vision of the future has a 10-story, 1,200-unit “museum-quality” self-storage facility with street-level retail and a rooftop garden.
The building won’t be presented as a self-storage facility. Instead, Freedman plans to hang banners promoting the Tampa Museum of Art, Glazer Children’s Museum and Tampa Bay History Center. Freedman is passionate about the arts, and three of his four children work in them.
“I wanted to have a trophy property that as people drove past downtown, they’d see a building that looks like none other in downtown Tampa,” Freeman told the Tampa Bay Business Journal.
Freedman said his construction and development costs will total about $4 million to $5 million more than the cost of building a lesser self-storage facility. Groundbreaking may take place by mid-2023. Freedman, who sold his facility near Midtown Tampa for $18.5 million, plans to self-fund the project.
There may be a problem, though. City staffers told Freedman that self-storage facilities within the urban core must be contained within residential buildings and that the storage space can be no more than 40% of the building. He’s hired Elise Batsel, a partner at Stearns Weaver Miller in Tampa, to help with the city approval process and gain an exemption to allow the project to start. Source: Tampa Bay Business Journal
Planned
Lynd Development Group LLC is developing an eight-story, $30 million mixed-use project off of U.S. 1 at 9300 S. Dixie Highway in Miami, FL. The project will include a facility comprised of 127,923 square feet of storage and 6,025 square feet of ground-floor retail in the Dadeland submarket. Construction is slated to start in eight months. The Lynd Group is a division of a San Antonio, TX-based company and has more than $1.8 billion of new development projects in its pipeline. Source: Real Estate Weekly
A 700-unit self-storage facility may be coming to Arkansas. Texas-based Parecon Ltd., a concrete and asphalt paving company, finished constructing a 10,000-square-foot building to serve as the new headquarters for its Northwest Arkansas regional office on South Main Street in Cave Springs. It’s mentioned as a possible component of a 45-acre, mixed-use commercial development with approximately 30 buildings. An engineering company is trying to allocate 15 acres for a self-storage facility that would include climate-controlled units, drive-up units and RV/boat storage. Source: TB&P
Completed
Boxed-Up Self-Storage held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Belvidere, IL. The facility has 164 garage-style units. It is the company’s sixth location in the Stateline area and the first in the Belvidere area. Source: 23WIFR
Legislative
The City Council in Thousand Oaks, CA, passed a moratorium on self-storage applications 10 months ago. Now the Thousand Oaks Planning Commission has presented new rules for consideration, limiting future facilities to M-1 (industrial park) and M-2 (light manufacturing) zones, and only on parcels at least 1,000 feet from the freeway and 500 feet from arterial streets. It’s estimated that such actions would leave about 30 parcels citywide, out of 52,000 total, available for self-storage. Source: Thousand Oaks Acorn
