You can't shed 30,000 jobs in a year without slamming the office market. Office vacancy in the Tampa Bay area rose by 883,000 square feet in 2008, according to Clearwater real estate firm Colliers Arnold. The dearth of tenants was worse for the 1.5-million square feet of office buildings completed in 2008. By year's end those new buildings, mostly in Tampa's West Shore and along Interstate 75, had vacancies of 55 percent. Downtown Tampa and St. Petersburg didn't show such dramatic growth in empty offices, if only because vacancies had already been comparatively high. One bright spot was Gateway, offices close to the Gandy and Howard Frankland bridges in Pinellas County. The vacancy rate among its top-quality offices remained low at 8.7 percent.