WINTER HAVEN ON THE VERGE OF BECOMING FLORIDA'S 'COOLEST' SMALL CITY
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Jul 15, 2022

Former St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker said he sees a lot of similarities between downtown Winter Haven and the Sunshine City.

Baker is an investor in and consultant to Six/Ten LLC, a real estate developer that says it is on a mission to make Winter Haven “the coolest small city in Florida.”

Six/Ten, which is based in Winter Haven, has been working on revitalizing the city’s downtown for close to 20 years. With hundreds of residential units in the pipeline, a hotel in the works and a weekly farmers market, Baker estimates Winter Haven is within reach of joining St. Pete as an urban renewal success story.

“The decimal points are in different places, but a lot of the concepts are the same,” Baker said of St. Pete and Winter Haven.

Six/Ten controls roughly 60% of the private property in downtown Winter Haven. In 2012, as the commercial real estate market began to show signs of recovery from the Great Recession, Six/Ten started looking at its investments in downtown Winter Haven as one large, mixed-use project, said CEO Bud Strang.

“We were fortunate that the downtown core was reasonably intact,” Strang said, “and there were a lot of older buildings that just needed some attention.”

Strang, an entrepreneur, said his family was in the citrus business, and he’d been involved with several other ventures before turning his focus to real estate.

Strang and his partners’ local ties are a major plus, especially compared to other cities that have revitalized their downtowns.

“Nobody has a Six/Ten of people who are from here and rolled up their sleeves,” Baker said.

Beyond a tapestry of historic properties, Baker says Winter Haven had another advantage: a public sector that invested in the urban core.

“As a mayor, you can walk around downtown and tell whether city government cares,” Baker said, “and this government has invested substantially in the park system.”

There’s also Polk County’s share of Florida’s influx of new residents. In May 2021, an analysis from the New York Times showed that the Lakeland-Winter Haven metropolitan area was the second-fastest growing in the U.S.

“There’s a certain amount of energy here — we don’t have to pull people from other places to fill our apartments,” Baker said. “We just have to steer people coming here to downtown.”

In urban development, residential properties typically serve as an anchor to drive foot traffic and business to surrounding restaurants and retailers.

Before Baker signed on, Six/Ten had largely focused on commercial projects with an emphasis on food and beverage concepts.

Adding residential units is now a priority, and DevMar Development, active in St. Petersburg, is now a partner in 105-unit RainDance, an apartment building that has topped off and will open to residents in November.

While Baker doesn’t have a crystal ball, with the developments under construction in downtown Winter Haven, he makes a prediction: The tipping point will come in December 2023.

“That’s when you’ll be doing more steering than pushing,” he says to Strang.