Are real estate investors pushing out St. Petersburg’s Black residents?

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.
Read the third report in our Buying up the Bay series at www.tampabay.com/buyingupthebay
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[@TampaBayTimes]

Read the third report in our Buying up the Bay series at www.tampabay.com/buyingupthebay

[@deepcow]

Answer, YES.

[@MurakamiTenshi]

Tampa's black residents were pushed to the outskirts back in the day, too

[@user-nc1nm2lb2i]

Easy solution: Obtain jobs and careers that affords you to buy the neighborhood. Think ownership and not woe is me