ST. PETERSBURG — Thirty years ago, St. Petersburg took a leap of civic faith when it leveled a low-income neighborhood to attract a baseball team.
Now Tropicana Field’s 85 asphalt acres offer another chance for neighborhood rehabilitation — this time without baseball.
More and more Americans want to live in dense urban areas. It’s a shift as profound as the exodus to suburbia that followed the Great Depression, real estate experts say. Almost any large urban tract holds potential for mid-rise offices, dollops of green space and hundreds of residences stacked above shops and parking garages.