HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — A vacant lot at the corner of W. 131st Ave. and North Boulevard in Forest Hills could soon be home to a roughly 6,000-square-foot, 14-bed assisted living facility. However, some neighbors are pushing back because they fear the development will worsen future flooding in the area.
Last year, Hurricane Milton severely flooded portions of Forest Hills.
WATCH: Could a new development make flooding worse? Some Forest Hills neighbors think so
“Towards North Boulevard and Fletcher, it was horrible. Towards Ola and 131st, it was terrible,” said Brian Blair, who’s lived in Forest Hills for more than four decades.
Gina Isin, another long-time resident of the neighborhood, said some of the damage still hasn’t been fixed.
“You still see it,” she said. “There’s people that haven’t moved back in their homes yet.”
Bev Kieny, president of the Forest Hills Neighborhood Association, reached out to ABC Action News to spotlight the concern. Kieny and the others fear that more impermeable concrete will mean more water runoff during periods of heavy rain.
The development will also include an eight-car parking lot.
“They are going to put so much concrete down for this facility that the water is not going to filter the way it should,” said Kieny.
Latonia Boykins is the small-business person behind the project. Boykins said the project is personal because it’s dedicated to her late grandmother.
“My grandmother developed dementia pretty early — in her early Seventies — and it was a hard pill to swallow for me. Took me to a very dark place,” Boykins said. “I decided to start this in her honor, and that’s how this all got started.”
Boykins founded Annie’s Assisted Living in her grandmother’s honor. The business owns five other assisted living facilities in the Tampa Bay region. It’s working on two more, including the North Boulevard location.
Boykins, who runs another assisted living facility in the same part of Forest Hills, said the North Boulevard location did not flood during Hurricane Milton and said the development’s plans include stormwater safeguards like a retention pond.
“There’s a lot that goes into this,” she said. “When you get into the permitting stage, you have to talk to everyone. There’s an entire stormwater department, and they factor in everything.”
She said the location will also be designed to blend in with the surrounding residential community.
“There’s not going to be any type of strange things happening. This is a home-like environment,” she said.
The future of the proposal, however, is now in the hands of Hillsborough County leaders. The property will have a rezoning hearing on Tuesday, Aug. 18, at 6 p.m.
Boykins said she’s open to meeting with neighbors to address their concerns.
Concerned neighbors, however, said they are not interested in concessions. They want county leaders to deny the project.
“Even rainfall now brings on flooding,” said Kieny. “To add all this concrete right there, where it doesn’t belong in the first place, is just going to cause more problems.”
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