Pinellas Park Weighs Its Largest Apartment Community Yet, With 552 Units Planned

A 31-acre office property along McCann Lake in Pinellas Park has received preliminary approval for what would become the city's largest apartment community. The proposal calls for 552 units, at least 221 of them designated as affordable.

City staff signed off on the preliminary site plan on September 30 for 10222 MCI Drive, located in the Gateway Centre Business Park. The project would be built in two phases and would replace an existing office campus with nine four-story apartment buildings, two clubhouses, pickleball courts and 847 parking spaces.

The plan relies on Florida's Live Local Act, which permits residential construction on the industrially zoned site as long as at least 40% of the apartments are reserved for households earning at or below 120% of the area median income. That requirement, which equals at least 221 units, must be maintained for a minimum of 30 years. The other 331 apartments would be offered at market rates.

Units would range from studios to three-bedroom layouts. Each of the nine buildings would stand four stories, with a maximum height of 50 feet. The first phase would include 388 apartments, a 9,543-square-foot clubhouse and 600 parking spaces. The second phase would add 164 apartments, a 7,186-square-foot clubhouse and 247 parking spaces.

A pedestrian walkway would run along the lake on the eastern edge of the property and connect to internal sidewalks and existing sidewalks on MCI Drive. The plans also include three new stormwater ponds. Miami-based developer MAST Capital is named in the plans, with Kimley-Horn handling the site plan application and Atwell preparing the civil engineering plans.

The site currently holds a three-story, 124,983-square-foot office building that once served as a major MCI call center. MCI opened the facility in 1993, bringing hundreds of jobs to Pinellas Park. Even the address referenced the company: according to a 2001 Tampa Bay Times report, 10222 was the prefix customers dialed to place long-distance calls through MCI's network.

After MCI merged with WorldCom, the center's work shifted from assisting small-business telephone customers to providing technical support for other companies. WorldCom announced the closure in 2001 and laid off 499 workers, eight years after local officials had welcomed MCI as a major employer.

Pinellas Plaza LLC, a company with ties to New York City landlord Jay Podolsky, bought the property for $6.3 million in 2002. In the mid-1980s, Podolsky, his brother Stuart and their father, Zenek, pleaded guilty to felony charges including grand larceny and coercion, after Manhattan prosecutors said the family paid a crew to drive tenants out of rent-controlled buildings. Jay and Stuart Podolsky received five years of probation and community service, while their father served 90 days in jail. The brothers later became major providers of hotel-based homeless shelter space for New York City, and in 2019 sold 17 buildings to the city for $173 million for conversion to affordable housing, a price that drew scrutiny from city officials.

In April 2025, Pinellas Plaza LLC transferred the property to two related entities, Pinellas J&S NV LLC and Pinellas S&S NV LLC, each holding a 50% ownership interest. The site plan application does not include a construction schedule or say when demolition of the existing office building might begin.