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Homes

Sparking neighborhood revival

The surroundings were risky when a newcomer bought there. Now she's helping its resurgence.

By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published May 27, 2005

Times Correspondent

TAMPA HEIGHTS - When Jennifer Frankowiak went house hunting five years ago she was still 20-something, single and working three jobs.

Then a part-time diving coach at Tampa Prep, she waited tables at a South Tampa restaurant and worked at an ad agency to make ends meet.

In the midst of her youthful struggle to scrape together a living, she realized she didn't want to continue to throw away $550 a month on a small Hyde Park apartment.

"I knew as a single woman I wanted to buy something; it was just a question of where."

The moment she walked into the 1,300-square-foot, 1922 Craftsman-style bungalow in Tampa Heights, she knew she had to have it.

And at $57,000, it was too good a deal to pass up.

"I could see how close the neighborhood was to downtown and I felt instinctively good about it," she recalls.

Riding the crest of the Florida real-estate wave, Frankowiak bought the house, swapping rent for an even cheaper mortgage payment of $500, and annual real estate taxes that totaled just $11 the first year.

The bargain price tag came with caveats, in particular a street still struggling with crime issues.

"My parents were against it, they said, "Are you sure you want to buy here?' " she says. "There was drug dealing going on, prostitution, vagrants, burglaries, car chases. When you first drove down the street, it felt unwelcoming. But I had already fallen in love with the house."

Then she fell in love again: with her future husband, Joe Solak, who was then working as the swim coach at Tampa Prep. By the summer of 2002, they began looking for a house they could share. They decided to enlarge Frankowiak's house and sell Solak's 1960s Florida ranch style home in Forest Hills.

Opting for Tampa Heights over north Tampa was all about convenience. Though both have since changed jobs - she has her own public relations firm near the Florida State Fairgrounds, and he's an insurance sales consultant working near West Shore Boulevard - the commutes are short.

They avoid the interstate rush hours by taking alternative routes, Frankowiak explains.

They now also walk to events they enjoy, including the Gasparilla parade, downtown art fairs, the Tampa Theatre and activities in Ybor City.

Keeping the house in Tampa Heights and building an addition was a no-brainer for other reasons, too.

"We knew we needed to make it a house for a family," Solak said.

The couple, who married in 2003 and now have a baby, 18-month-old Jorja Daisy, wanted a house they could stay in and comfortably raise a family. They also have a small menagerie of rescued pets, including Ziggy, a black cat with a crooked tail, and Bernie, a 13-year-old Corgi mix, abandoned at Lloyd Copeland Park off Fowler Avenue.

They've slowly added on a 500-square-foot master bedroom suite and bath, a detached, two-story garage with a 380-square-foot office, built a deck and remodeled the kitchen. They estimate it cost them between $100,000 and $115,000, a job they took on carefully and paid for as they went.

"It's still ongoing," explains Frankowiak of her remodeling efforts, which have since expanded to include painting and replacing trim work in the original living room and removing stucco from the front exterior of the house.

They saved money by doing much of the work themselves, from installing hardwood floors to painting to building the 16-by-24-foot deck off the family room.

Their street, in the northeast quadrant of Tampa Heights, doesn't boast the same grand old houses as the swath of neighborhood to the south. The houses are more modest - plain, really. And the couple chose to keep the front of theirs frill-free until recently, focusing their efforts on the expansion in back.

Now, their house is one of five with matching white picket fences, a joint effort among neighbors to give the brick street a unified look. A house four doors down recently sold for $255,000. Frankowiak, who has helped organize the Tampa Heights house tour during the last two years and who opened her own bungalow to the public this year, plans to plant a butterfly garden in front. She's also hung a Tampa Heights historic district banner from her front porch.

"We're seeing more and more people driving down the street on weekends looking for property," Frankowiak explains. "We've had people knock on our door wanting to buy."

The first question potential buyers ask, she says, is "whether the neighborhood is safer now."

Thanks to two Tampa Police Department officers assigned to the area, she thinks it is.

"We've had very few problems. In five years here I've had nothing happen to me except for someone trying to steal my car once, minor stuff," she says.

And the iron bars are coming off their windows as soon as they can figure out a way to do it.

"They were bolted into the frame of the window (by a previous homeowner) so it's going to be a little tricky."

Frankowiak admits her street still has a long way to go before it's Hyde Park quaint. (She estimates approximately 60 percent of the houses along a three-block stretch of Jefferson Street from Columbus to Floribraska avenues stand vacant, while another 30 percent are investor owned.)

The remaining 10 percent, she notes, are "the diehard homeowners."

"People who stop by always comment on how we've added on, how our house is really different because of that," Frankowiak says. "They ask whether the house is for sale, what it's selling for, do we know of any others for sale? The neighborhood is moving along nicely. You can't go too fast. We need a few more pioneers, a few more people willing to take a chance for the good of the neighborhood, not for the good of their pocketbooks."

[Last modified May 26, 2005, 08:33:06]