Tampa Bay healthcare growth faces affordability and workforce hurdles
September 2025 — Tampa Bay’s healthcare industry is at a pivotal moment, according to industry leaders. While development is booming, major hospital systems are struggling to reconcile the health sector’s rapid expansion with the broader community’s needs: accessibility and affordability.
“All the health systems are mobilizing to grow,” said Chriss Papayannis, vice president of advisory at Realty Trust Group, during a panel at the recent Invest: Tampa Bay leadership summit. “But there are environmental vulnerabilities that come with real estate, in addition to scarcity, and cost of capital.”
Pappayanis was joined by fellow speakers Sean Williams, founder and principal architect of Carbon Design & Architecture, and Thorn Baccich, EVP of development at Flagship Healthcare Properties, who discussed the interplay of real estate, healthcare, and community.
In recent years, Tampa Bay has seen remarkable demographic growth, creating an opportunistic landscape for real estate developers in the healthcare sector, with a number of key million-dollar expansion projects, from Tampa General Hospital’s acquisition of a property in Hyde Park, to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital $62 million expansion of its St. Petersburg Campus. But Tampa’s hospital systems are now trying to align two diverging goals: creating a healthcare ecosystem that is accessible and affordable for the entire community, while maintaining growth and costs in check.
According to Baccich, this is because regional price sensibilities can greatly influence hospital site decisions and project size.
“In Hillsborough County, you’ve got quite significant mobility fees that can add millions of dollars to your project, whereas in Pasco County, those are waived,” said Baccich. “That’s quite literally the difference in developing a 50,000 square foot building and a 60,000 square foot building.”
Given rising cost pressures, one of the core obstacles facing Tampa Bay is the lack of affordable housing. As Williams noted during the panel, there simply isn’t enough housing near hospitals, making it difficult for healthcare workers to find affordable places to live near their work, especially for a region that thrives on a young workforce and that is already struggling with a shortage of medical practitioners.
“On-call nurses and doctors need to be within the 30-minute radius, and we’re not able to provide that just yet,” Williams said.
“It’s critical to get the talent near the hospitals,” he added. “Not just for the healthcare side, but for the whole area to be able to produce any kind of economic growth here.”
To tackle this challenge, leading care provider Tampa General Hospital has partnered with property manager The Michaels Organization to develop nearly 170 units of workforce housing for nurses and staff in Brandon.
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Although, for Pappayanis, that’s just the first layer of infrastructure needed. The bigger piece is to align some of the region’s broader infrastructure needs with the right strategic outlook for long-term growth in the sector. This means building local talent from the ground up, leveraging the strength of Tampa’s collection of colleges, universities, and technical schools through educational partnerships.
As Williams noted, Tampa Bay’s sizable academic presence, growing number of employers, and younger demographics make this attainable. “When we had an office down in Sarasota, we had a really hard time recruiting anybody under the age of 50 to go down there and work in the office,” he explained. “They wanted to be in Tampa where it was lively.”
For Williams, this is an overlooked opportunity. Beyond filling in talent pipelines and supporting workforce growth, Tampa’s young professionals are critical to driving research and innovation advancements. “We’re now starting to see thriving innovation districts like the ones in St. Petersburg and Water Street…(the youth) are bringing something new to the market that can help us grow.”
“Most of the young people that are using the research here are going to stay here,” added Pappayanis. “That’ll just continue to proliferate in Tampa and bring it to the next level.”
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