After years of promises to revive 22nd Street South, the City of St. Pete is finally making progress on projects expected to bring new life back to The Deuces.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, 22nd Street South, from 2nd Avenue to 18th Avenue, was the heart of St. Pete’s Black community, filled with thriving businesses, music clubs, and restaurants.

But after I-275 cut through the area in the mid 1970s, the busy corridor slowly fell into decline.

Now, with a growing pipeline of new developments on the horizon, the Deuces is beginning to show signs of revival.

At a community meeting this week at the Enoch Davis Center, city officials gave updates on several ongoing projects.

A dirt site the city promised to redevelop into a thriving live-work environment for the South St. Pete community has remained just that - an empty lot - but officials are headstrong on pushing the project forward with significant subsidies.

During a Thursday, January 18th city council meeting, the majority of councilmembers passed a string of resolutions to move the needle on the affordable 24-unit townhome development located on 22nd Street South between 6th and 7th Avenue in the Deuces, a historic African-American entertainment and business district in the 22nd Street South corridor.

The approved resolutions included a roughly $13.1 million maximum guaranteed price (GMP) to Tampa-based Horus Construction Services, which was hired as the design-build firm in 2019.