Alvin Williams recalls sleeping in a shampoo chair in a friend’s beauty salon for a few months after he was evicted from his home in Tampa last year.
His other choice was sleeping in his car.
So, it was a fresh change of scenery when Williams moved into a 10-by-10-foot tent with a thin foam mattress in Tampa Hope, a transitional shelter run by Catholic Charities Diocese of St. Petersburg, and later, a reinforced 8-by-8-foot cottage.
Williams is getting another upgrade.
He is one of the 22 residents that will call the Mercy Oaks II Apartments his new home. The affordable housing complex was retrofitted from an old strip mall to create 17 apartments with low-cost rent for people making up to 80% the median income in Tampa. Median income would be about $73,400 for a family of two.
Every storefront in the strip mall, which was partly vacant, was converted into a home. Some of the one-bedroom apartments are as big as 750-square-foot and the two-bedrooms about 958-square-foot.
The complex is operated by the Catholic Charities of the Diocese of St. Petersburg, which serves counties in the greater Tampa Bay region including Hillsborough. Residents don’t have to pay for water, sewer or trash services and the charity provides basic necessities, such as a refrigerator and dishwasher.
“I would’ve never imagined going through this,” said Williams, who is 57 and works part-time at O’Reilly Auto Parts. “I’m blessed enough to be a part of this.”
On Wednesday, city officials and leaders of Catholic Charities celebrated the opening of the new apartment building and emphasized the importance of low-cost housing in the city.
Mayor Jane Castor thanked Catholic Charities for their work helping to get people back on their feet. The city contributed $1.25 million from its State Housing Initiatives Partnership funds for the purchase of the strip mall.
“I fully believe that our self-worth, to a very large degree, is based on our contribution to society,” Castor said. “To get the assistance that you need, to get back to that position is a gift that I don’t think many people can give.”
Castor recently announced that a long-held promise to bring 10,000 affordable homes to the city by 2027 won’t come to fruition.
The city has added about 8,300 new units since the start of her tenure. The mayor overstated progress toward that threshold, a Tampa Bay Times report from 2023 found.
“They don’t happen overnight,” Castor said. “We continue every single day to stay focused on creating the necessary affordable housing.”
Tampa City Councilwoman Naya Young said the city needs to take an innovative approach to affordable housing. Rather than starting from scratch to build a new project, Young said the city should utilize buildings that are already available.
“We don’t have to go and find another place or have to build something up, there’s something that’s already there,” she said.
The new Mercy Oaks apartments sit across the street from another Catholic Charities-run apartment complex and the site where Tampa Hope began in 2020.
Back then, 100 tents lined what was at the time vacant land. It was a temporary fix to give the city’s homeless population some respite as the pandemic shut down shelters.
That’s when Maggie Rogers, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of St. Petersburg, had the idea to transform the old strip mall across the street into housing.
“I just happen to come back into the office and I’m like ‘Ladies, what if we buy that weird-shaped building over there?’” Rogers said.
Six years later, the remnants of the old barber shop and boutique store that occupied the building are long gone, replaced by one- and two-bedroom apartments ready to give someone a fresh start.
