ST. PETERSBURG

Over the decades, Tom O'Brien saw a dramatic metamorphosis of his native Boston.

"It was nothing years ago when I was growing up,'' he says with a still distinct accent. "We used to fish at the pier and no one was down there. Now there's a Marriott at $600 a night.''

Sixteen years ago, O'Brien "chased a woman'' to another city still in the early stages of a much-needed makeover. That relationship ended but love blossomed for his new home of St. Petersburg.

"I always say, St. Pete has the bones, and when you look at Central Avenue going out 30 blocks from the water, you've got a great city and the people are great.''

That's why O'Brien's Tiger Opportunity Fund 1 has bought nearly a dozen lots over the past year in Palmetto Park, just south of Central and 22 blocks from the downtown waterfront. On them he plans to build some "really nice'' townhomes and single-family houses, at prices geared to buyers who can't afford the Old Northeast but still want to be relatively close to downtown's bounty of bars, shops and restaurants.

"I'm taking quite a risk here,'' O'Brien says, "but I think in three or four years you're going to see a dramatic difference.''

O'Brien is among the builders and investors seeing opportunity in once-shunned neighborhoods south of Central and west of Fourth Street. Still perceived by many as high-crime areas of vacant lots and run-down and boarded-up homes, Palmetto Park and Roser Park are becoming the latest poised to benefit from the resurgence of downtown St. Petersburg.

"It's time for it,'' says Lou Brown, a veteran real estate agent who watched prices tumble to virtually nothing in some areas south of Central after the 2008 housing crash. "It's the culmination of the market getting better, the economy picking up and just the timeliness.''

What Brown calls "very aggressive prices'' have helped sell long-vacant lots. The city also pitched in, stepping up police protection and code enforcement while demolishing scores of vacant homes that had become magnets for crime, vagrants and pests.

The hope that making neighborhoods safer and more attractive would spark development appears to be paying off. The most prominent name drawn to the south-of-Central area is Domain Homes, a Tampa-based company that has built dozens of new houses in other urban areas of Tampa Bay once considered marginal.

Domain currently is under contract to build homes on four of the eight lots it owns in Roser Park, a historic, artsy district close to downtown and bounded by Fifth Street and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street and Sixth and 11th avenues S. The buyers? A doctor who works at nearby Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital; a private pilot who wants to be close to Albert Whitted Airport; and two young professional couples buying their first homes.

Farther west, Domain is under contract to build on two of the three lots it has in Palmetto Park, an area between 34th and 22nd streets, and Central and Eighth Avenue S that was heavily targeted by the city's blight-removal efforts. Although the neighborhood still has its share of eyesores, its pluses include brick streets, mature trees and proximity to the Warehouse Arts District and the Grand Central business district.

Most of the new Domain homes in Roser Park and Palmetto Park will be between 1,900 and 2,000 square feet and run in the $300,000 to $400,000 range — far above Pinellas County's median home price of $200,000 but still way below what a comparable-sized house in the Old Northeast would cost.

Domain "is a builder that wants to work with the aspirational buyer and provide affordable homes in neighborhoods that are up-and-coming,'' said Leisa Erickson, a Re/Max agent who with husband, Matt, represents the company in Pinellas. "We see them transitioning neighborhoods from something below average to something above average.''

Erickson shrugs off crime concerns as endemic to most urban areas.

"There is crime everywhere,'' she said "Is it violent crime? Often no. It's petty theft, so have an alarm system, lock your cars, be pretty smart about what you're doing.''

O'Brien, the Boston transplant, is another who sees Palmetto Park as prime for rebirth. He also owns property just north of Central, but says houses there are starting to cost enough that it's not economically feasible to tear them down and build new ones.

In Palmetto Park, by comparison, O'Brien has acquired some lots for less than $10,000 in a neighborhood where enough people take pride in their homes to indicate others will want to move in. He expects to begin with five bungalow-style homes with porches on Second, Third and Fourth avenues S.

"I'm bullish (on the area) though I'm starting out slow because I want to make sure my theory is correct,'' says O'Brien, who developed property in Boston, owns a construction company and does a daily financial talk show on radio. "I've seen three real estate crashes so I know the other side of it, too.''

Priced from $250,000 to $275,00, the three-bedroom, two-bath homes each will have a garage plus a detached one-bedroom apartment that the new owner of the house could rent out to help cover mortgage payments. (Current zoning allows that.)

If the bungalows do well, O'Brien plans three townhouses at the corner of 28th Street and First Avenue S, where he is demolishing existing houses. The new ones likely will be priced $275,000 to $300,000.

As a real estate agent, Brown is glad to see the market improving south of Central. As a lifelong resident of the area, he has some worries.

"There is always a concern about what I call 'urban removal' — that's when you come in and take low-income or moderate-income properties and turn them into properties that people living there can't afford,'' he said.

Ideally, Brown added, new homes in an area should be priced closer to current home values and at amounts current residents might be able to afford.

"If you are in a neighborhood of $100,000 to $150,000 homes and suddenly everything goes to $250,000 or $300,000 without any break, that's very difficult,'' he said. "But if you can build up to that point, then people living there can benefit. What do they say — all boats rise in a rising tide.''

Contact Susan Taylor Martin at smartin@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8642. Follow @susanskate.