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Condo Towers Fuel High Hopes For Downtown Retail Life

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 19, 2007

Although strolling through downtown Tampa may never replicate the experience of window shopping on Michigan Avenue in Chicago or New York's Fifth Avenue, 2008 could be the year that downtown Tampa begins to amass enough restaurants, galleries and shops - and buzz - to pique the interest of people accustomed to spending all their time, and money, in the suburbs.

If you want to see what's fueling the new retail push in downtown Tampa, just look up.

A handful of new condo buildings, mostly towers, have been completed. The new condos create demand for new shops and restaurants by bringing new residents downtown. They also provide ground-level space for tenants to lease or buy.

Business, Page 1

•How much retail space will become available in downtown Tampa this year? No official figure is available, but a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows 150,000 to 200,000 square feet, most of it in the Channel District.

•Retail expert Lee Nelson said restaurants and shops will "flock" to the newly built space. But it will take years - not months - for the vacancies to be filled.

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