400 luxury Clearwater units rise
Construction has started on The Bluffs, the redevelopment of Clearwater’s former City Hall, which will add about 400 luxury apartments to the market. (tampabay.com) That volume of new, high-end units creates near-term demand for model-unit styling, turnkey furnishing packages and investor-focused upgrade services. (tampabay.com)
A cleared-out civic site on South Osceola Avenue is turning into a 28-story apartment tower with 400 rentals, 12,000 square feet of retail, and 440 parking spaces after years of false starts in downtown Clearwater. The land used to be Clearwater’s City Hall, and the city demolished that 1960s-era building in 2019 before voters approved selling the property in 2022 for $9.3 million. The project is called The Bluffs, and city materials list it as a 400-unit, 620,000-square-foot apartment development at 150 South Osceola with construction starting in March 2026 and opening targeted for June 2028. New York-based Gotham Organization is building it with Palm Harbor-based DeNunzio Group, and Moss Construction is the contractor on a design by Behar + Peteranecz Architecture. The financing only came together in late February, when the developers said they had secured $160 million, including a $115 million senior loan from Wells Fargo and another $45 million from Schroders Capital and Lionheart Strategic Management. That matters in Clearwater because big downtown projects have been promised for decades, and this one is now moving with shovels in the ground instead of renderings on a wall. The tower is being built next to Coachman Park, the city’s 24-acre waterfront park that reopened in 2023 after an $84 million remake that added the BayCare Sound amphitheater, playgrounds, picnic areas, and a new connection between downtown and the Intracoastal Waterway. The same development team is also building a 158-room Hilton hotel about a block away on the old Harborview Center site, so the apartment tower is not a one-off project but one half of a broader downtown reset. Inside the apartment building, the planned amenity list looks like a resort brochure: a gym, spa, co-working space, game room, and a terrace with indoor and outdoor seating. Retail tenants have not been named yet, but the developers said they are aiming for neighborhood-serving businesses such as restaurants, fitness studios, and salons at street level. If the June 2028 target holds, Clearwater will go from an empty former government parcel to hundreds of new market-rate homes on one of the city’s most visible waterfront blocks in just over two years.
