Downtown, the channel and the Riverwalk
The Hillsborough River meeting the bay, the Riverwalk along it, and the newest housing in the city built on the lowest ground in it.
Photograph: The old Hillsborough County High School · Lexiajainz · CC BY-SA 3.0 · source4 guides in the part of Tampa that has changed most in twenty years. Downtown was an office district that emptied at six; the Riverwalk, finished as a continuous two-and-a-half-mile path in the 2010s, is what turned it residential. The Channel District beside it is newer still. Warehouse and port land rebuilt from the 2000s, and then rebuilt again as Water Street from 2019.
This is the most walkable part of Tampa and the lowest-lying. The Channel District's reference point measures under nine feet above sea level, which after 2024 is the first thing to establish about any address here. The compensation is that almost all of it is new construction on the current wind code, with funded reserves and impact glass as standard. The opposite case to the older waterfront condominium stock elsewhere in this metro. Two things to check: the building's flood elevation and what its garage did in the last surge, and whether it is a condominium with a structural integrity reserve study, because Florida's 2022 law applies here as everywhere.
4 communities, guide by guide
Channel District
New construction on the current wind code, nine feet above the bay. The exact opposite case to the older-condominium problem the rest of this site keeps flagging.
- 8.8 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 2019
- Water Street begins delivering, rebuilding much of the district a second time
Davis Islands
Two dredged islands sold off a 1924 prospectus, holding the region's Level 1 trauma center and a general-aviation runway on ground five feet above the bay.
- 5.2 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 1920s
- When D. P. Davis built the islands up out of Little Grassy Key and Big Grassy Key, City of Tampa
Harbour Island
A 1980s island of condominiums a people-mover ride from the office towers, and the clearest place on the site to explain Florida's milestone inspection at thirty years.
- 8.4 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 177 acres
- The former Seddon Island, sold by the Seaboard Coast Line for redevelopment in 1979
Tampa Heights
Tampa's first platted suburb, on high ground at the north end of the Riverwalk, where a 1910 streetcar barn reopened as Armature Works and reset the block.
- 47.7 ft
- Elevation at the neighbourhood's reference point, USGS 3DEP point query, 2026
- 1883
- Year the town plat for Tampa's first suburb was drawn for E. A. Clarke, on the rise north of downtown
Photographs: The American Victory on the Channel District waterfront by Akjameson1, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons · Davis Islands, Tampa by Roman Eugeniusz, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · The Marriott, downtown Tampa by Gordon Tarpley from Tampa, USA, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.