TAMPA, Fla. — Two years after Hurricane Helene sent storm surge into parts of Tampa, the city is close to closing out nearly all the building permits filed for storm-related repairs.
Davis Islands was among the neighborhoods hit hard by flooding. On one street, homeowner Greg Cowen said seven homes have been demolished since the storm. New, larger homes are now being built where single-story ranch-style homes once stood.
“Things are definitely getting better, though. For sure,” Cowen said.
Inside Cowen’s home, there are no visible signs of the damage Helene caused. Nearly everything inside is new. But getting to that point took months of work, repairs, and permitting.
“When you walk into a situation like that, the unknowns are what’s really scary,” Cowen said. “You don’t really know how to process everything, so we kind of had to just take it step by step.”
Cowen and his family were out of their home for nine months while crews gutted and repaired it. Like many homeowners, they also had to navigate the city’s permitting process before work could be completed.
“Navigating that process can be certainly a challenge,” Cowen said. “And the city did provide some pretty good resources to us.”
According to the City of Tampa, its Building Services department received 1,525 permits for storm damage related to Helene. Over the past two years, 1,463 of those permits have been closed. Just 62 remain open, with 40 of them in the final stages.
The storm created a major workload for the department. Tampa processed just over 26,000 permits in 2023, the year before the storm. In the first year of Helene recovery alone, the city processed close to 30,000 permits while also handling its regular permitting duties.
“This is the first time we’d really been hit with a storm directly that way,” said J.C. Hudgison, Tampa’s chief building official. “And so for staff, even our staff themselves, to make sure that they were safe and able to come in to do the work.”
Hudgison said the department is proud of the progress made.
“Staff feels really good, like we had a process, we’ve kind of stuck to it as we’ve gone through all of these permits and then still handling our normal workload as we had over 29,000 permits that were issued last year,” he said.
City officials said the official number of storm-related permits may be slightly lower than the actual number filed because of how permits were tracked. Like many local governments, Tampa waived permitting fees for months after Helene to help homeowners recover.
The city also created a Hurricane Permitting Guide, now available online, to help residents better understand what steps to take if another storm impacts the area.
For homeowners like Cowen, the recovery process has been long, but the neighborhood is slowly returning to normal.
Two years after Helene, city officials say the experience helped Tampa improve its storm recovery response and become more resilient for the future.