The University of Tampa has broken ground on the largest student housing project in the institution's history — an 11-story, 210,000-square-foot residential tower at 110 S Boulevard that will accommodate up to 833 students across 238 units, with completion targeted ahead of the Fall 2028 semester.
The development includes study rooms, shared common areas, and ground-floor dining space. UT acquired the site for $10.5 million in early 2025 in a joint transaction with RISE Real Estate Group, a student housing-focused developer with a national portfolio of university-adjacent projects.
The parcel's prior history adds a layer of context. Before UT's acquisition, 110 S Boulevard had been entitled for a 22-story mixed-use tower — nearly twice the height of the university's planned structure — that never advanced past the planning stage. The site stalled and eventually changed hands, landing in UT's portfolio as the university moved to address enrollment-driven housing pressure near its Hyde Park-adjacent campus.
At 210,000 square feet across 11 floors, the tower will be one of the more substantial residential additions to the UT campus in recent memory. The 238-unit count and 833-bed capacity suggest a mix of unit configurations, likely including multi-bedroom suites designed to maximize density while meeting the study-and-live programming the university has emphasized in its newer residential buildings.
The ground-floor dining component is worth watching. Purpose-built university dining spaces at this scale often signal operator conversations — whether UT manages it in-house or brings in a food service partner will matter to the blocks immediately south of the campus core, where several independent operators have established footholds in recent years.
RISE Real Estate Group's involvement reflects a broader pattern in university housing development: institutions partnering with specialized private developers to accelerate projects that would otherwise move slowly through internal capital planning. Whether the structure of that partnership gives RISE any ongoing operational role, or whether UT is acquiring the building outright upon completion, was not specified in the available source material.
Construction is expected to wrap before Fall 2028, giving UT roughly two academic years of active building on a site that sits within walking distance of downtown Tampa's northern edge. The S Boulevard corridor, running along the western boundary of the campus, has seen incremental development pressure as UT's enrollment has grown — this project represents the university's most direct assertion of that corridor as a campus expansion zone.
The $10.5 million acquisition price for a parcel of this footprint, in a location this close to downtown, reflects the early-2025 transaction timing and the prior project's failure to advance — conditions that likely made the land more accessible to an institutional buyer than it would have been at the peak of the mixed-use pipeline that defined Tampa's development cycle from 2021 through 2023.
With a Fall 2028 target, the project will come online during what is shaping up to be a significant period for the S Boulevard and West Kennedy corridor. How UT activates the ground-floor dining space — and whether the tower's opening accelerates retail and service interest in the surrounding blocks — will be the story to follow as construction advances.
