Live in Roser Park

Charles Roser came to St. Petersburg from Ohio in 1910 and in 1911 began a subdivision on C. D. Hammond's ten acres of citrus groves along Booker Creek, just south of the town. By 1913 the newspaper was promising 60 lots on 12 blocks of brick streets and sidewalks, and Roser had given five acres for a school; on 27 February 1918 he gave the City much of the land, the creek included, which the association still keeps as the neighborhood's birthday. The association calls it St. Petersburg's first neighborhood, with hilly, tree-lined drives, and the reference point stands 38.9 feet above sea level. The park in the middle, at 7th Street and 9th Avenue South, carries the same name; on this page "Roser Park" means the neighborhood unless it says the park.

It is the smallest guide on this site. The City draws no neighborhood boundaries, so this guide takes the area the Historic Roser Park Neighborhood Association filed and the City maps: 86 acres from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street South to 4th Street South, below Interstate 175, where the 2020 census counted 627 residents in 363 homes. The association areas overlap here. All 627 are also inside the Downtown Residents Civic Association's much larger area and 210 inside Bartlett Park's; they are counted here. 561 are inside the City's South St. Petersburg Community Redevelopment Area, which adds no rate.

Two historic districts, and only one of them binds. The City made Roser Park its first local historic district in July 1987 and added 801 to 829 10th Avenue South in 2018; the 92 residents inside it need a certificate of appropriateness from the City's historic preservation staff before changing a building's exterior. The National Register district of 1998 is larger, 298 residents and, in Wikipedia's count, 146 historic buildings, but a National Register listing alone puts no limit on what a private owner does. Know which side of that line the house is on.

The storms left little here. Helene's surge set a record at the St. Petersburg tide gauge on 26 September 2024, 6.31 feet above the usual high tide, and flooded the bayfront neighborhoods; the City assessed one property in Roser Park afterward and found no water inside. After Milton it assessed nine, two recorded as major damage and none with water inside. Those are assessment points, one per parcel. FEMA's map still puts 18.7% of the area in its 1% annual chance zone, with 30 residents on blocks inside it, while the reference point is in zone X and its parcel in no evacuation zone. In that zone the City applies the substantial damage rule at 49%, not FEMA's 50.

No price index follows the line. Zillow's typical value for ZIP code 33701 was $742,292 in August 2026, but that ZIP is downtown's, 19,137 people, 9,678 of them in the Downtown guide, so it describes downtown more than this neighborhood; the city's was $355,759 in June 2026. Every address pays 19.9197 mills for 2025, the City's 6.4525 among them. A homestead at the ZIP figure owes about $13,948 a year after the exemption ($25,000 off every levy, a second $25,000, indexed since 2025, off all but the school board's); a landlord, about $14,786. Save Our Homes caps a homestead's assessed value at 3% a year and resets after a sale, so the seller's bill understates yours. Flood cover is a separate policy, and Citizens requires it on every wind policy from 1 January 2027. The City's stormwater fee, $12.67 to $59.08 a month from 1 October 2026, comes on the utility bill. The arithmetic is on the St. Petersburg page.

It is a place to live without a car. Route 4 runs every 15 minutes on 4th Street South, the free Downtown Looper stops by the hospitals 0.54 km away, and the SunRunner to the beach is 0.85 km away. PSTA's schedule changes on 4 October 2026 and keeps Route 4's trips.