Ray Charles recorded his first song on Central Avenue. A highway erased the street. Sixty years later, private-equity firms that control 1 in 5 single-family rentals in Tampa Bay are filing the evictions.
Most cities in this wave have one displacement story. Tampa has two, separated by sixty years and joined by the same street. The first was carried out by the state — eminent domain, urban renewal, and interstate construction that literally paved over Tampa's first and largest Black neighborhood. The second is being carried out by capital — the private-equity and corporate landlords that flooded into Tampa Bay's housing market after 2008 and now hold an outsized share of the homes ordinary families rent. The tools changed. The direction did not.
The Scrub traces its history to just after the Civil War, when newly freed people built homes in a scrub-palmetto thicket northeast of the young town of Tampa. Its spine was the Central Avenue business district — and between 1900 and 1930, as Tampa's Black population quadrupled from about 4,400 to over 21,500, Central Avenue became one of the most important Black commercial and cultural corridors in the American South, known as "the Harlem of the South."
Central Avenue fills with Black-owned businesses — 56 in the neighborhood by 1899. Ray Charles, living briefly in Tampa in the late 1940s, records his first song, "Found My Baby There." Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald perform on the avenue.
The city declares the Scrub a slum. The Tampa Housing Authority razes a third of it, replacing 442 homes with the Central Park Village public housing project. The Tampa Tribune celebrates "abolishing Tampa's greatest eyesore."
Construction of Interstate 4, Interstate 275, and the Cass-Orange Connector rips through what remained of Central Avenue. A city council member would later say plainly the destruction "was backed by racism on a local level and a federal level."
The Tampa Bay History Center estimates fewer than a dozen structures from the Scrub still stand. In 2023, the city granted historic status to two of the last surviving early-1900s homes on East Scott Street.
This is the same pattern this wave has traced from Tampa to Atlanta: a highway route chosen to run through the Black part of town, "slum clearance" as the legal cover, and a thriving business district reduced to a historical marker. The Scrub is the starkest example in the series of displacement carried out not by market forces but by the state itself — and it's the necessary backdrop for what came next.
After the 2008 foreclosure crisis, institutional investors discovered the American single-family home as an asset class — and Tampa Bay became one of their favorite markets in the country. A Tampa Bay Times investigation tracking the region's ten largest corporate landlords found that, based on the most recent census estimates available, these companies control roughly 1 in 5 single-family rentals across Hillsborough and Pinellas counties.
These aren't small operators. The list includes Progress Residential, a private-equity firm that controls around 5,500 homes in Tampa Bay; the Amherst Group, backed by Koch Industries; and Invitation Homes, one of the largest single-family landlords in the nation. When a fifth of the homes a working family might rent are owned by a handful of firms answerable to distant investors rather than to a neighborhood, the terms of renting change — and so does the speed with which a missed payment becomes a court filing.
That second number is the heart of the Tampa Bay Times finding. The single-family eviction filing rate across both counties averaged about 4 filings per 100 rental households — but eight of the top ten corporate landlords filed at rates well above that average. Sparrow Realty Investment, with around 250 homes, posted the highest rate at roughly 15 filings per 100 properties — nearly four times the local norm. Amherst and Progress Residential were close behind. Together, the corporate landlords the Times reviewed accounted for 35% of single-family eviction filings while owning only about 18% of the rental homes.
Eviction Lab's national research has repeatedly found the same structural truth: eviction filings aren't spread evenly, but concentrated among a small number of buildings and landlords who use the court system as a routine rent-collection tool rather than a genuine last resort. Tampa is the clearest single-family version of that finding in this wave. Where Milwaukee's or Atlanta's concentration showed up in large apartment complexes, Tampa's shows up house by house, across whole subdivisions owned by firms headquartered somewhere else entirely.
Florida's legal environment makes it easy. Hillsborough County is widely described as a landlord-friendly jurisdiction; a nonpayment eviction there starts with a 3-day notice, costs a landlord roughly $185 to file, and can move from notice to sheriff lockout in as little as three to eight weeks if the tenant doesn't contest. For a corporate landlord operating thousands of units on thin per-home margins, that speed and low cost turn eviction filing into a spreadsheet decision.
Perfect Tenant Innovation can't undo the highways that erased Central Avenue, and it can't buy back the fifth of Tampa Bay's homes that Wall Street now owns. What it can do is change the calculation at the exact moment a corporate landlord reaches for a filing. PTI rewards on-time payment and builds a tenant's credit through rent, creating a documented record of reliability that gives even a distant, spreadsheet-driven landlord a reason to accept a payment plan instead of a $185 filing — and gives the tenant leverage they don't currently have when the eviction process starts as a late fee on a frozen portal.
The Scrub was built by people who had just been freed and had nothing but each other. What they built was erased, but the instinct behind it wasn't. PTI is one more tool for the neighborhoods that came after — a way to keep a home when the landlord is a fund and the filing is a formality.
See how Perfect Tenant Innovation helps tenants build toward stability and helps landlords keep good tenants housed instead of filing against them.
Join the Tenant WaitlistThey paved the Harlem of the South. They can't be allowed to quietly foreclose on what replaced it. PTI is one more tool for keeping Tampa's renters in their homes.