| Chapter 1: | Spatial and Environmental Justice in the Metropolis |
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result of this effort, it has emerged as one of the busiest leisure-cruise ports in the world. The port itself is a 2,500 acre (1,012 hectare) Special Development District which houses massive storage and handling facilities for vast quantities of hazardous raw materials, petroleum, and toxic petrochemical products. Due to industrialization relocations out of the regional economy during the last few decades, the port also owns several vacant and derelict industrial properties and landholdings. During the recent property boom, many of these assets were slated for remediation as commercial and residential hotspots.
During the last decade, gentrification and urban revitalization projects were launched in most of the economically distressed historical neighborhoods surrounding the port and the downtown city center which formed the old industrial and commercial core of the region. Instead of being refurbished to address the county's affordable housing crisis, most of the port's remediation projects were redeveloped and promoted as exclusive residential and commercial enclaves to appeal to the fickle wants of the parvenu of a postindustrializing regional economy. Rebranded as “Wall Street South” by the Tampa Bay Partnership (2008), a local and regional growth coalition, selected parcels of downtown Tampa and the Port of Tampa have been singled out by powerful metropolitan decision makers as a strategic platform for attracting global capital, especially through its residential and commercial redevelopments which fulfill the new lifestyle requirements of Tampa Bay's so-called “young and restless” (Cortright & Colletta, 2008). The objective here is to attract and retain these youthful business professionals and “creative classes” (Florida, 2002) and a fair share of the White middle class and well-off retirees back into the historic city center and away from the wasteful, sprawl-created, and traffic-clogged suburban gated communities of North Tampa and northern Hillsborough County