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Belleair plans multifamily project at former mobile home park on 4th Street North
A 112-unit multifamily development on 4th Street North won approval from the St. Petersburg Development Review Commission.
Belleair Development Group plans to build the $30 million project at the site of the former Lamplight Mobile Home Park on 4th Street North at 87th Avenue North.
The 112 units will be market-rate rentals, built to look like townhomes, and all of them will have four bedrooms, providing a housing product that is in short supply in St. Petersburg, Carlos Yepes, partner and owner of Belleair Development Group, told commission members Wednesday.
Belleair Development is among the most active developers in Pinellas County and in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. The company’s core business is freestanding retail projects, but it has expanded into multifamily housing more recently.
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Belleair has been working on the 4th Street project for almost four years, Yepes said. The company bought the property in January 2018 for $3.4 million, according to Pinellas County records. Belleair relocated the residents in the former mobile home park to better housing before clearing the land, Yepes said.
“This was a terrible mobile home park,” Yepes told the commission. “We decided to improve it with the concept of building these townhome type buildings and provide the type of housing that’s needed in the city. We’re going to do all four-bedroom houses. There’s a dire need in the city for four bedrooms.”
The property is in a flood zone, requiring the houses be elevated to 11 feet above ground level. Belleair’s project will add five additional feet to that requirement, Yepes said.
The rental units will be built to look like townhomes.
Belleair will build 19 separate structures, according to the report to the DRC. Eighteen of the structures will be two-story buildings with four housing units each. Parking with space for four cars for each unit will be on the ground level. Living space will be on the second floor and there will be rooftop terraces.
The remaining structure is a three-story building with 40 units. The first floor of that building is dedicated to parking and the upper two floors will have 20 units each.
The Development Review Commission approved the plan by a five-to-two vote. No further approvals are needed.
Construction is expected to begin in the next 90 days, said Christian Yepes, also a partner and owner at Belleair Development. The company will work on one phase at a time, with each phase expected to take about 150 days to build.
The project does not yet have a name, Yepes said.
