Tampa Is Building Faster Than the New Comp Plan Projects

Thursday evening council holds the adoption hearing for TA/CPA 24-04, the Future Land Use section of the comprehensive plan. When the plan was first presented last year, one thing they said struck me - the plan needs to accommodate 74,000 more people in the city by 2045. But how many did the current plan accommodate? I ran the numbers in May 2025 and the current plan already supports that.

Seventeen months later there’s more data, and all of it points the same direction. The current plan, the one being replaced, is already producing housing faster than the new plan says the city will need it.

Plan Hillsborough’s projection

The summary in the packet, last updated June 25, 2025, uses 2024 as the base year:

The 2024 population is the University of Florida’s official April 1, 2024 estimate (BEBR, the Bureau of Economic and Business Research, whose numbers the state uses for revenue sharing and comp plans). Tampa’s line is in Table 1 of the 2024 report. The projection front-loads the growth: 39,707 people in the first six years, about 6,600 a year, then between 2,100 and 2,700 a year after 2030.

The current plan was built for the same number

In May 2025 I pointed out that the 2040 plan was designed for a projected population of 481,128 in 2040. Plan Hillsborough’s new projection for 2040 is reduced to 473,423. The 2045 figure, 484,168, is only 3,040 people above what the current plan already planned for.

The current plan says so in its own text. LU Objective 2.1:

“Regulate the levels of building intensity according to the standards and land use designations, in order to accommodate the projected population increase of 150,000 people and 157,000 employees by 2040.”

The update deletes that objective. It is struck through on page 69 of the adoption packet. Nothing replaces it with a number. So the target hasn’t moved. The question is what the current plan has done with it.

What’s been built

The property appraiser’s parcel data, pulled October 17, lists every residential unit inside city limits by the year it was built. While the new plan was being written, the current one delivered this:

The last two years, 8,905 units. The plan projects 12,328 new units needed for the six years from 2024 to 2030. So the first two of those years alone produced 72% of it. Stretch the window back: from 2018 through 2025 the city added 27,258 units, more than the 26,275 the plan projects for the next 21 years.

Units built in 2024 and 2025, on their parcels. Teal circles are apartment projects, sized by units; the dots are houses, townhomes and condos, merging into larger circles as you zoom out. The full map covers 2018 on, with controls.

A note on the counting. The appraiser’s roll lists zero units for tax-credit affordable, student housing and Live Local Act properties, which would have left out 19 apartment projects since 2018, among them the Housing Authority’s two new West River buildings on West Main Street and the Richman Group’s 354-unit project on the old Fun Lan site at 2302 East Hillsborough Avenue. I pulled each of those from the appraiser’s parcel records and added them back: 2,462 units, 1,408 of them in 2024 and 2025. What the numbers still don’t do is subtract the house that was torn down for the townhomes. Even if you throw out every single-family home as a possible rebuild, 2024–25 added at least 7,506 units. Still well above the projected need.

Who moved in

BEBR’s April 1, 2025 estimate for Tampa is 412,684, up 3,226 from the plan’s 2024 baseline. Reaching the plan’s 2030 figure of 449,165 from there would take about 7,300 new residents a year for five straight years, more than double what the city just managed in one.

(The Census Bureau’s own estimate is lower still, 573 people from July 2024 to July 2025, but it’s a different series with a different base, so I’m sticking with the plan’s own source.)

The 4,922 units finished in 2024 and the 3,226 people who had arrived by the following April are not a contradiction. The American Community Survey counted about 6,000 vacant units for rent in Tampa in 2024, a 6.3% rental vacancy rate that has held between 6% and 7% since 2022. That’s more than a year’s worth of new housing, at the rate Tampa built it in 2024, sitting empty. Anyone who has looked at Zillow lately knows this already. The ACS also counts 194,129 housing units in the city in 2024; the plan’s base is 187,600.

Supply is running ahead of arrivals. Under the plan being replaced.

Thursday

None of this is an argument against density. I made that case in 2025 and it stands. What has changed is the question. Then it was how much growth the current map could hold. Now it is how much more this plan allows, when the current one is already building ahead of the projection. Neither number is in the 367-page packet. Staff didn’t have the first when I asked last year, and nobody has offered the second.

What council votes on Thursday also isn’t quite the plan it sent to the state in February. The last three pages of the packet are staff’s revisions answering two letters from Florida Commerce, and council can amend from the dais. Some version of this plan has to be adopted by January 1 or the amendment is deemed withdrawn under state law, and the city has already taken one extension to get there. Which version is Thursday’s news. What the state’s review took out were design standards, not density, and that’s a story for after the vote.

Thursday council will consider a plan written to accommodate 74,710 more people. The plan it replaces is already housing them faster than they arrive.