It’s been more than two years since he left, but St. Petersburg native Keylon Lovett still aches for hot summer nights shooting the breeze with friends. He remembers the grandmothers on his block who knew all the children’s names. Every year, he looked forward to block parties and barbecues and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.

Lovett, 36, wanted to settle in Campbell Park, the neighborhood where his family has lived for three generations. But in 2016, when he returned after seven years in the U.S. Army, he was shocked by how much had changed.

Entire homes were demolished to make way for construction. Home prices skyrocketed. The house his grandmother saved every penny to buy in the 1970s was falling apart, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in fines for code violations.

Staying no longer felt like an option. His family eventually sold his grandparents’ home to a real estate investor. Lovett moved to Atlanta, where he could get a new five-bedroom house for the price of a two-bedroom fixer-upper in St. Petersburg.

“It was heartbreaking,” he said. “It felt like a betrayal to myself.”

Lovett’s story has played out countless times in Campbell Park and other historically Black neighborhoods in St. Petersburg. While longtime residents are priced out of communities they’ve called home for generations, the area just south of downtown has become ripe for real estate investors.

A Tampa Bay Times analysis has found that large companies have bought hundreds of properties in the South St. Petersburg Community Redevelopment Area, a 7.4-square-mile district where the city provides resources to encourage economic development.

These companies buy homes everywhere in the Tampa Bay area, the Times found, but their purchases are especially clustered in the district’s historically Black neighborhoods, including Campbell Park, Jordan Park, Bartlett Park, Melrose Mercy, The Deuces and Childs Park.

Between 2018 and 2022, nearly 6% of home sales in the district were individuals or smaller entities selling to large companies. That’s three times more than most other parts of Pinellas County, where an average 2% of sales in a given census tract involve investment firms.

Around 20 companies own 300 homes in the district. Based on census estimates, that accounts for about 1 out of 10 single-family rentals in the area.

These investors aren’t solely responsible for the area’s inflated rental and home prices, or the gentrification that took root years ago.

David Howard is chief executive officer of the National Rental Home Council, a group representing several large corporate landlords. He said these companies create new housing and improve the quality of life in under-resourced neighborhoods by refurbishing properties that were once uninhabitable.

“Communities that have a greater range of housing options are more livable communities,” he said.

Increased investment can lead to cleaner streets, new businesses, lower crime and higher property rates, said Tamara Felton Howard, a local attorney who helped with real estate development in the Community Redevelopment Area.

But as companies cash in on the area’s newfound popularity, she fears the effects won’t be felt by the people who grew up there — but by the newcomers who replace them.

“My concern is that working-class people are being priced out of this market,” she said. “I want people who are from here to be able to live here and enjoy it.”

Lasting impacts of segregation

Real estate investors own more than 27,000 homes in Tampa Bay. Some of those homes are owned by smaller companies or local landlords. But 7 out of 10 of the homes are linked to large institutional investors backed by Wall Street and private equity dollars, a Times analysis of property data found.

Across the Sun Belt, corporate investors are buying single-family homes and turning them into rentals. This creates more competition for homebuyers and has been tied to rising rents, experts say. For Black residents, who face hurdles finding safe and affordable housing due to structural racism, the stakes are even higher.

Properties in Black neighborhoods tend to be undervalued, which can create higher returns for landlords. Investors buy homes at especially high rates in majority-Black areas, according to research from Drexel University.

As early as the 1920s, Black St. Petersburg residents were relegated to the city’s south side. But out of this segregation sprung a collection of distinct, thriving neighborhoods, said Nikki Capehart, president and chief executive officer of the Pinellas County Urban League. Places like the Gas Plant District, Peppertown, Methodist Town and the Deuces emerged, each with their own churches, schools and businesses.

By the 1970s, more opportunities opened for upper- and middle-class Black families to move out of segregated neighborhoods. Meanwhile, government-led efforts to modernize the city were made at the expense of Black residents. The extension of Interstate 275 sliced through 22nd Street South, the city’s main Black business corridor. The Gas Plant District was razed to eventually make way for a white-domed stadium and acres of parking lots.

“Not long after there started to be a real decline around drug culture,” Capehart said. “It’s something that was happening in cities across the country, this disconnection in the Black community.”

The term “South St. Pete” took on a negative connotation, associated with high crime rates, vacant lots and crumbling infrastructure.

A cultural shift

Brian Peret, president of the Campbell Park Neighborhood association, said he suspects people’s perception of life on the south side is bleaker than reality. When he moved from Riverview in 2014, blighted properties and garbage in the streets with the occasional gunshot were more the norm.

Still, it was nothing compared to some of the rougher parts of Milwaukee where he grew up. There, “Black was synonymous with poor,” he said.

While house hunting in St. Petersburg, he drove down streets filled with middle-class Black people — teachers and letter carriers and business owners living the American dream of homeownership.

“To see that there were entire neighborhoods of this stuff that we thought was a fantasy on ‘Family Matters’ or ‘The Cosby Show.’ I was like, ‘This exists in some places?’ That was when I fell in love with South St. Pete,” he said.

In 2015, the city created the South St. Petersburg Community Redevelopment Area to promote investment, loans and grant funding for housing and business development across more than 20 neighborhoods. City leaders say the district has fostered cleaner, safer and more vibrant communities. But as dollars pour in, housing has become less affordable.

Rapid growth in downtown St. Petersburg over the last decade is spilling over into the redevelopment area. Young professionals and families in search of inexpensive homes near the city center trickled in. It didn’t take long for investors to catch on.

Home values did rise at higher rates in neighborhoods within the Community Redevelopment Area, data from Zillow shows. Between January 2018 and January 2022, home values in the area increased an average of 102%. In other St. Petersburg neighborhoods, home values increased about 61%.

The changes haven’t all been bad, Peret said. He’s seen crime go down and property values go up.

But as Campbell Park and the rest of the redevelopment area attract outsiders, he fears that many of the Black residents who remained even when it was considered “undesirable” won’t get to experience these benefits.

There were 6,000 fewer Black residents in the district in 2022 than a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, causing an overall decline in the area’s population. Meanwhile, the number of white residents increased about 38%.

“Every time somebody comes in, somebody leaves,” Peret said. “Each of those stories is a tragedy.”

Competing with corporations

Maurice “Mo” Franklin describes St. Petersburg’s south side as “beautiful, wonderful — but expensive.”

The real estate broker and senior pastor at United Kingdom of Christ Fellowship Church noticed when companies began buying a few years ago, a “spotlight got turned on the Tampa Bay area.” Prospective homeowners he worked with were fatigued and burned out, having their offers rejected in favor of investors with cash.

He gets calls from companies two or three times a week — something he can’t remember happening nearly as frequently before the pandemic.

The buying spree actually started just prior to the pandemic, in 2019, when a quarter of all investor home purchases in Pinellas County happened in the city’s redevelopment area, the Times found.

No large company has bought more homes in the area than The Amherst Group or its in-house property manager, Main Street Renewal, the Times found. Between 2019 and 2022, the investment company, backed by Koch Industries, acquired 117 single-family homes in South St. Petersburg. It still owns more than 100 of them today, making Amherst the largest landlord in the area.

“There’s a lot of people that want to live here now,” said Fran Pheeny, the president and chief executive officer of Suncoast Housing Connections, a nonprofit developer that builds lower-cost homes for first-time buyers who meet certain income qualifications.

Years ago, Suncoast had its pick of vacant lots in the redevelopment area. Now it struggles to compete against larger developers making cash offers, Pheeny said. The agency frequently receives offers from investors wanting to buy its homes, oftentimes while they are under construction. It’s frustrating, Pheeny said, knowing how many people are desperate to stay local but can’t afford the rising prices.

“We want to find people who live in this community, who know this community,” Pheeny said.

Holding on to family ties

High school sweethearts Nate and Tiara Miles grew up near the Jordan Park neighborhood. Both learned the importance of homeownership at a young age.

Nate’s mother was a lifelong renter who was unable to fulfill her dream of buying a home. Tiara’s great-grandmother owned a whole block of homes in the neighborhood at one point and rented them to relatives.

The couple, along with their 8-year-old son, Karter, lived six years in a home owned by Tiara’s mother, a tiny one-bedroom built in 1940.

During Hurricane Irma in 2017, a tree collapsed on the house, damaging the roof. The couple pitched in to help pay for repairs. That’s when something changed for Nate Miles: “If I have to go through all of this, I would rather it be my own house that I have to take care of,” he said.

The couple spent months searching for a place and even considered moving an hour away to the rural Hillsborough County town of Wimauma, where their budget would stretch further. Then, they discovered a house that Suncoast was selling on 19th Avenue South. Priced at $225,000. It was one of the only options they could afford.

Nate Miles’ dream is to pass down his house to his son, so he can raise his own family in a community where he has roots.

Keeping the home in the family will also help create intergenerational wealth, something Miles said used to be a lot more common. Most of his childhood friends lived in homes their parents had inherited from their grandparents.

But in recent years he’s noticed a shift. Many of those parents sold their homes and moved away. Their children ended up either renting or moving to Pasco County and beyond in search of a bargain.

In many cases, those houses were turned into rentals or torn down and redeveloped.

“Sooner or later there’s not going to be a south side of St. Petersburg anymore, it’s just going to be all people from out of state,” Miles said.

A similar story played out for Keylon Lovett’s family. After his grandfather died in 2017, the family home his grandparents bought sat vacant for years. Over time, it began to deteriorate — the grass was overgrown, shingles were falling off the roof, squatters ripped the door off and took shelter inside.

The city’s Codes Compliance department started handing out citations. By 2023, the property racked up more than $100,000 in liens — beyond what anyone in the family could afford.

Lovett hoped he’d be able to fix up the house using a home loan he got from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, but restrictions on the loan prevented him from doing so.

Though the home was never listed for sale, the family was bombarded with calls, texts and letters from investors offering cash. Last summer, Lovett’s mother and her siblings decided they couldn’t hold out any longer. They sold to a company called RS Investment Properties LLC, which offered to pay $115,000 and cover the liens.

Lovett still visits St. Petersburg often, but it pains him to drive past his grandparents’ old house.

“I feel,” he said, “like we’re losing a familial kind of link.”

About Buying Up the Bay

Buying up the Bay explores how the rise of real estate investors in Tampa Bay influences the housing market.

The first installment tracked which companies are driving this trend in the region and where they’re buying. The second took a closer look at the expansion of one private equity firm and its effect on tenants in Tampa Bay. In the coming weeks, we will examine how certain corporate landlords have evicted tenants at higher rates.

Buying up the Bay was written and reported by Rebecca Liebson and Teghan Simonton.

Liebson covers real estate, focusing on how trends in the market play out in people’s everyday lives. Simonton is a data reporter covering business and health, focusing on poverty and cost of living.

We welcome your feedback, tips or personal stories. If you are affected by this topic or if you have ideas about what the Times should cover in future installments, email us at rliebson@tampabay.com or tsimonton@tampabay.com.