Plan advances for long-neglected Wimauma, despite housing conflict

Juggling 22 community plans might seem like a tough task. But that’s exactly what Hillsborough County is doing right now. 

While 22 are on the agenda, county officials say one stands out above the rest: the Wimauma Village Plan.  

A drive down State Road 674, east of Interstate 75, you pass by a number of prominent business chains — Wendy’s, Denny’s, Taco Bell, Domino’s Pizza, Winn-Dixie, CVS, McDonald’s, Aldi. Then you start noticing a handful of food trucks, a small fresh market, a barber shop. That’s when you’ve reached Wimauma.

The census-designated area is situated in south Hillsborough County, neighboring Sun City Center and about a 40-minute drive from downtown Tampa. 

In the 2017 Sociocultural Data Report the county released, 42.9% of Wimauma’s land use is geared toward agriculture, which takes up nearly 7,000 acres. The other land use behind that is residential, at 11.5%. Some of the biggest farms in the county include Casa Sierra, a family-owned butchery and meat wholesaler, Jaymar Farms Inc., a strawberry and melon farm and Corley Bee Co., a honey farm.

The sense of urgency for the community plan, which spouts goals like achieving affordable housing and introducing infrastructure, is palatable: about 30% of Wimauma's population of 9,467 people live in poverty. 

Templated action

The Wimauma plan, even with a stack of hurdles, is being used as a template for other communities. 

“One of the things that is strikingly different from other communities is the presence of these nonprofit organizations and the ability of the people involved to come together and create a plan,” Hillsborough County Community and Infrastructure Planning Director John Patrick says. “We want to create that kind of participation in other communities. It makes the county’s job much easier.” 

One example of what Patrick is talking about comes from Enterprising Latinas. The Wimauma-based organization, with the primary goal of helping women, teamed up with the Wimauma Community Development Corp. to develop the Wimauma Now! campaign. Together with Taryn Sabia, director of Florida Center Community Design and Research at the University of South Florida, they spearheaded a planning process that took place during a pandemic, extending the process to 20 months. 

The work led to a county meeting on March 6 to approve a three-to-five year action plan, which is just a fraction of the overall 20-year Wimauma Village Plan. 

One part of the plan focuses on a notion that seems to be a common theme: affordable housing. 

The median household income in the community in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, was $46,296. The per capita income over 12 months in 2021 was $18,103. That makes Wimauma one of the poorest communities in Hillsborough County, Census data shows. In addition, according to The Mortgage Reports website, in order to afford a $300,000 house, a person’s annual income needs to be between $50,000 and $74,500. 

But homebuilders are attracted to Wimauma — despite the affordability factor being lopsided against many local residents. Driving around the 25-mile community, for example, a visitor will see flags flapping around with the phrase “Homes start at $300K” rivaling with mobile homes. 

Southshore Bay by D.R. Horton, one of the largest homebuilders in the U.S., based in Texas, has a townhomes series that starts at $299,990 for 1,673 to 1,758 square feet, right off State Road 674. The homebuilder’s tradition series starts at $364,990 for a little more square footage. And Berry Bay, a master-planned community in Wimauma, features homes by D.R. Horton and Miami-based Lennar. Those homes start at $323,990. 

Lennar officials declined to comment on the company’s strategy behind the project; two email requests and a phone call to D.R. Horton officials weren't returned. 

While not familiar with the specific projects in Wimauma, John Neal, president of Lakewood Ranch-based Neal Land and Neighborhoods, says the Wimauma housing conundrum is part of the conflict most other builders go through in most other communities across Florida. For one, land costs and materials are rising rapidly, and so to are regulations and impact fees. That makes new homes more expensive wherever you go. 

“Abnormally high costs are a product of inefficiencies in the marketplace more so than they are the will of developers to sell something expensive,” says Neal, who has been in the homebuilding and development business for more than 25 years and is the son of one of Florida’s most prominent homebuilders, Pat Neal. “Homebuilders, in order to be effective in the marketplace, try to sell homes at all different price ranges. They want to sell to the largest segment of the population.”

“Florida is a great place to live,” he says. “It's sometimes hard living in a place where everybody vacations.” 

Patrick echoes this sentiment.

“As growth happens, the challenge is going to be that the property values are going to get higher,” Patrick adds. “That’s just the nature of economics. So one of the things that we laid out in the plan is to make a master plan for affordable housing to make sure that the residents in this community are not gentrified”

While logical from a developer and landowner's perspective, Enterprising Latinas CEO Liz Gutierrez has a different view. “The housing production that has occurred already and continues to occur is not housing that is accessible to anyone that lives in the community currently,” Gutierrez says. 

“What’s going to happen to the people who are here when all of this housing gets built?”

Memory lane

This isn’t the first community plan in Wimauma: one that was approved in 2007, then stalled in the recession.   

So why has it taken so long to breathe life back into the plan?  

“There are 22 community plans adopted today and, while it is ideal to have those updated every 10 years, because of some of the resource limitations and priorities of the local government, we haven’t stayed on that schedule,” Melissa Zornitta, executive director of the Hillsborough County Planning Commission, says, adding the county initially asked for an update to the plan in 2019. 

While approved, the plan did accomplish a new land use category for the residential areas, Zornitta adds. Named the Wimauma Village Residential-2 (WVR-2) zoning designation, the category permits landowners to rezone under a set of specific conditions.

The changes have had significant impact When USF’s Sabia held focus groups during the 20-month planning process to see where the 2007 community plan fell short, the biggest issue was the community couldn’t build something as simple as a laundromat. “They couldn’t do it because they couldn’t meet the code requirement of having a sewer hookup because the infrastructure is not there,” Sabia said during an ULI event in February.   

That’s why Enterprising Latinas spent a year advocating in front of the Hillsborough County Commissioners, to get the planning commission to take on the responsibility of conducting a neighborhood plan. 

“We understand that we can’t change the course of a woman’s life if the environment she lives, works against her,” says Gutierrez on why Enterprising Latinas became involved. “We thought that if we could, in fact, create new commercial districts, new jobs that paid higher wages, provide education and training, (we could) do all of these things in the community and not in someone else’s.”

Without Gutierrez, Sabia poses the plan may not have moved forward. 

“The advocacy of Liz and her team to getting this process started was tremendous. They were the champions of this happening,” Sabia says. “Without them, no one would know it was needed.” 

In addition to the passion of Gutierrez, success, say many involved in the community, requires another component: a fat wallet. “There’s a lot of public money that has to be invested in Wimauma in order for the infrastructure to be created so that commercial development can occur and so that affordable housing can occur throughout the entire area,” Gutierrez says.  

The community plan, along with actions taken, is part of the county’s budget, says Zornitta.

Part of the action plan includes building a new regional library, installing a safe pedestrian crossing for Florida State Road 674, upgrading the sewer and water systems and creating a main street, all actions that will be paid for through the county’s budget. “We understand that this is a long term proposition that requires continued monitoring of progress,” Patrick says. “So what we plan to do is go back to this document every so often at what action we have accomplished, not accomplished and what is the problem on certain things. We are hoping that we will be able to accomplish most of the action items we have laid out.” 

The county has estimated it will cost around $250 million to accomplish all the items on the action plan. 

Uphill battle

The part of the Wimauma Village Plan that seemingly gets the most attention is affordable housing. To prod that along, Hillsborough County is offering a slew of incentives. That includes encouraging townhome and small apartment developments through increased clustering of homes. It also includes transferring density from the WVR-2 to downtown Wimauma, in addition to utilizing area median income measures specific to Wimauma. 

Hillsborough County also offers a number of affordable housing funding, density bonuses and permit extradition incentives. Yet Mark Vengroff, managing partner of Sarasota-based One Stop Housing, isn't sold that any of these incentives work, in any part of the region. Vengroff, like Neal, doesn’t currently have any projects in Wimauma. 

“I think it’s all in good intention,” Vengroff says of density bonuses, “but what ends up happening is the number of affordable units is so small in comparison with what the need is that it really isn’t going to make much of a dent.” 

And it creates smaller units. Vengroff’s example is a project with 10 apartments designed to be 1,500 to 2,000 square feet per unit. Instead of doubling the square footage, the double density allows for 20 units, but instead they’ll be 750-1,000 square feet. 

“The belief is that because they’re smaller square footage, the builders will be able to double the density, and because they’re smaller units, (the builders will) charge less,” he says. “But you and I both know that doesn’t translate the same way.”

The county’s planning director John Patrick, on the other hand, believes incentives will be enticing to developers. 

“As you see more and more development happening in that area,” he says, “I think developers will start looking at the advantage of taking these incentives to provide more residential units that otherwise may not be able to be accomplished.”