Council Clears Nearly 3 Million Square Feet in East Ybor for a New Tampa General Hospital Campus

Tampa City Council has approved a rezoning that clears 24 acres of East Ybor industrial land for a new Tampa General Hospital campus, allowing nearly 3 million square feet of development on a site now occupied in part by heavy metals recycling yards. The property covers 16 parcels bounded by North 26th Street, East Adamo Drive, the Selmon Connector and the CSX Railroad, which puts a full hospital campus a few minutes from downtown, Ybor and East Tampa neighborhoods that currently drive to Davis Islands or Brandon for hospital care.

Hospital and medical office space will be the largest single piece of the plan. Everything else is built around it.

Approved use	Maximum allowed
Total development	Nearly 3 million sq ft
Commercial	More than 1.3 million sq ft
Residential	522 units
Hotel	200 rooms
Retail	49,000 sq ft
Parks and open space	About 2.5 acres

The two heavy metals recycling operations already on the property do not have to leave right away. Recycling remains an allowed use under the approved rezoning, so those businesses can keep running through the transition while the rest of the site turns over to health care and offices.

Zone A was the sticking point

The land sits inside the coastal high hazard area and in evacuation zone A, the first zone ordered out when a storm threatens. Councilwoman Lynn Hurtak spent much of the hearing on that, asking how patients would physically reach a hospital there during extreme weather and how the medical offices around it would be protected from flooding over decades, not just next hurricane season.

Tampa General Executive Vice President Adam Smith said the health system has already spent heavily on redundant water and power at its existing campus and would carry those lessons into new construction. He pointed to the AquaFence flood barrier system the hospital deploys around its Davis Islands campus as part of how it keeps critical care running through a storm.

Smith said the East Ybor hospital has not been fully designed yet. When it is, he said, it will follow Tampa General's newer resilience standards: patient care areas and critical infrastructure elevated above expected flood levels, with patient rooms and mechanical equipment kept off the first floor. Hurtak also pushed for detail on the surrounding medical offices, where expensive equipment and clinical operations would sit outside the hospital's own walls.

A new street, sidewalks and shared garages

The approved plan splits the 24 acres into 11 blocks and cuts a new North 28th Street through the property, with the developer responsible for building the new streets and upgrading public utilities. Sidewalks along the corridor will run 6 to 8 feet wide, with landscaping, shade trees and benches.

Roughly 2.5 acres, about 100,000 square feet, has to be set aside as parks and open space, split between larger greens and smaller pocket parks. The applicant is also working out possible connections to green space under the Crosstown Connector. Parking will be handled by shared structures serving several blocks at once rather than a separate lot or garage behind every building.

Planning Commission staff found the request consistent with Tampa's comprehensive plan, citing the mix of uses, the added housing and the pedestrian commitments. Staff also noted what anyone driving Adamo already knows: the area around it is still largely industrial, but the land use designations have been shifting toward denser residential and commercial for years.

How we got here

The groundwork was laid in October 2025, when council approved a comprehensive plan amendment on parcels owned by developer Darryl Shaw, opening land that had been industrial-only to mixed use. Tampa General and Shaw briefed council that same night on the hospital's plan to buy about 10 acres, with an option on another 6.45, west of the Selmon Connector between Adamo Drive and East 4th Avenue.

Shaw filed the rezoning request in February 2026 under the name Casa Ybor, a 25-acre master plan that also calls for rebuilding pieces of Ybor's historic street grid. It sits near Tampa General's other recent Ybor move, a 32,000-square-foot innovation center that opened last October in the former Masonite building on East Fifth Avenue.

Several important numbers are still blank. Tampa General has not said how many beds the new hospital will have, what it paid for the land, or when construction starts. Each building will go through its own review as the site develops in phases, which means residents get another look at the specifics, block by block, before anything opens.

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Header photo: Grendelkhan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)