Seven Decisions That Killed Downtown

[visionary]

Corporations tend to support the community where their headquarters are located.  Jacksonville has lost many corpoprate headquarters due to mergers and acquisitions.  Our economic development should be focused not only on more jobs, but on headquarters of corporations in the Fortune 500, or better still on the Fortune 100.

[Sentient]

To be honest, if the price to redevelop the Shipyards is going to run taxpayers upwards of $50 million in public cash, DT would be better off with it sitting vacant or being turned back over to heavy/maritime-oriented industry (assuming it pays taxes on waterfront property). That cash would be put to better use bribing a few more growing local companies like EverBank to move their corporate offices to downtown.  As they expand, they'll be more likely to make civic minded investments in the city than someplace coming to town to operate a regional call center.

EverBank had more to do with their previous landlord blowing the renewal negotiations than with Mayor/Council/JEDC/Cornerstone etc....

Also most of the tax incentives offered can only be applied to sales taxes, so that renders them useless for many companies.

[thelakelander]

Anyone know the occupancy on the 1951 Atlantic Bank building adjacent to 121 Atlantic Place on Forsyth?

Isn't that the building for which the old post office tower was torn down?

Right now, JTA is leasing around 33k square feet in that building. I believe the lease is for five years. This is the site of the old post office. However, it was torn down about ten years before Atlantic Bank expanded. Furchgott's old store, which takes up the north half of the old post office site, was built in 1941.

[thelakelander]

Also most of the tax incentives offered can only be applied to sales taxes, so that renders them useless for many companies.

In 2013, Hertz decided to relocate their corporate office and 700 jobs from New Jersey to Southwest Florida. A big influence of the move was Lee County giving them $19 million in economic stimulus funds.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/05/07/hertz-headquarters-relocate-lee-county/2140561/

Back in 1995, the City of Lakeland got Publix to move its corporate IT department from their corporate complex west of town, to an abandoned former downtown JCPenney store.

The nugget in luring them was a deal from the Lakeland Downtown Development Authority to lease the structure to Publix for $1 a year, with the option to buy the 120,000 square foot building, anytime for $10.

Publix moved 500 workers into the space.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1346&dat=19950221&id=v5wsAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Hv0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=6537,41602&hl=en


Publix has continued to grow. Earlier this year, the chain leased 3 floors of space in an adjacent downtown building to accommodate its much larger 2015 group of IT workers.

http://www.theledger.com/article/20150107/news/150109489

The city and LDDA did the exact same thing with a closed Burdines across the street, with another company, Watkins Motor Lines. Watkins, took the deal and moved 400 corporate employees into that building.

The company employs about 850 people in Lakeland and 10,000 nationwide.

Watkins Motor Lines has an extensive history in Lakeland. The company, founded in 1932 by William B. Watkins III in Metcalf, Ga., survived the Great Depression and moved to Lakeland in 1966. The company's headquarters is located on West Griffin Road, and Watkins also has an administrative center downtown on East Lemon Street, in the former Burdines department store.

When Watkins expanded downtown in August 1995, the influx of about 400 employees helped revitalize the area and attracted new businesses, said Anne Furr, executive director of the Lakeland Downtown Development Authority (LDDA).

"The smaller businesses were smart enough to see that if you have people downtown, they're going to want to eat, they're going to want to shop," Furr said.

Watkins acquired the downtown property in a 20-year lease with the LDDA at a cost of $1 per year. Burdines had donated the building to the LDDA in exchange for tax credits, and Watkins spent about $4.5 million converting the facility.

http://www.theledger.com/article/20150107/news/150109489

Overnight, they transformed a dead zone of their downtown into an active one. Watkins was eventually acquired by FedEx in 2006 but their offices are still in the building.

In 2001, attracted to change in atmosphere, another local company, MidFlorida Credit Union, acquired the 10-story Marble Arcade (similar to the Greenleaf & Crosby Building) for their offices. Today, the street tying them together is lined with restaurants, bars and retail.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1346&dat=20010703&id=LbtNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=hP0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=5988,2379739&hl=en


Btw, the LDDA also did some other things. They included two-waying all of downtown's streets (including the one shown above), streetscaping all of the streets, extensive public landscaping and upgrading all the public parks. Today, it's hard to believe that Kentucky Avenue (shown above) used to look like Adams Street back in the mid-to-late 1990s.

[Wacca Pilatka]

Anyone know the occupancy on the 1951 Atlantic Bank building adjacent to 121 Atlantic Place on Forsyth?

Isn't that the building for which the old post office tower was torn down?

Right now, JTA is leasing around 33k square feet in that building. I believe the lease is for five years. This is the site of the old post office. However, it was torn down about ten years before Atlantic Bank expanded. Furchgott's old store, which takes up the north half of the old post office site, was built in 1941.

Thanks!

[fsujax]

Certainly sad to see the impacts these mergers had on Jacksonville, but nice to see some local homegrown companies rising to fill the gaps..i.e. Everbank.

[Houseboat Mike]

Certainly sad to see the impacts these mergers had on Jacksonville, but nice to see some local homegrown companies rising to fill the gaps..i.e. Everbank.

Little known fact is that EverBank used to be Alliance Mortgage, and before that it was Charter Mortgage. So in a way, Charter finally made good on that promise to share space with Bellsouth, since EverBank now has 9 floors of the old Bellsouth tower....

[thelakelander]

^Nice!

[thelakelander]

^The title may be a little dramatic because downtown isn't actually dead but the skyline pretty much is. A chunk of the jobs from these 7 major companies (for example, all of Gulf Life, Independent Life, etc.) relocated to other cities such as Charlotte, Nashville, Houston, etc.  Some others, like AHL, relocated to other parts of town.  In the case of First Union taking out both ANB and FNB, nearly 600 duplicate downtown jobs were eliminated before Wachovia took the remaining 2,000 out of the Ed Ball Building and downtown in the early 2000s.  Those that remained became regional offices for companies that have not made the same type of civic investments in the core that the companies the purchased, once did. 

The result is a Northbank skyline that hasn't seen an office tower built since Barnett left town. The drought we're in now is the longest in the city's history. The same can't be said of the towns where the jobs moved too.

It's hard to see how Jax could have kept Charter from going up in smoke during the oil glut of the 1980s or the insurance industry from falling apart during the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. By the same token, it's hard to imagine us doing anything local that would have stopped the Charlotte banks from offering enough cash for our banks, so they could expand into the Florida market.

[thelakelander]

lol.  some of them just moved to the southside, where the landscape is friendlier to business and customers.

Yes. This was mentioned in the article and response I just made.

^The title may be a little dramatic because downtown isn't actually dead but the skyline pretty much is. A chunk of the jobs from these 7 major companies (for example, all of Gulf Life, Independent Life, etc.) relocated to other cities such as Charlotte, Nashville, Houston, etc.  Some others, like AHL, relocated to other parts of town.  In the case of First Union taking out both ANB and FNB, nearly 600 duplicate downtown jobs were eliminated before Wachovia took the remaining 2,000 out of the Ed Ball Building and downtown in the early 2000s.  Those that remained became regional offices for companies that have not made the same type of civic investments in the core that the companies purchased, once did.

If the city had invested in small businesses, gotten out of the way on dormant realestate that strangled district growth, encouraged alt space residency and stopped demolishing all of the buildings (like most of the other cities) there would have been a life worth keeping the HQs in.

We'd have a better looking downtown today but that would not have stopped the 1980s oil glut, First Union, American General and Nations Bank from taking out most of the companies that built the skyline we have today.

[Wacca Pilatka]

If the city had invested in small businesses, gotten out of the way on dormant realestate that strangled district growth, encouraged alt space residency and stopped demolishing all of the buildings (like most of the other cities) there would have been a life worth keeping the HQs in.

We'd have a better looking downtown today but that would not have stopped the 1980s oil glut, First Union, American General and Nations Bank from taking out most of the companies that built the skyline we have today.

I get the sense that after First Union acquired Atlantic and Florida National, the "First Union of Florida" division acted rather autonomously of First Union in NC and made some fairly significant community investments.  It even played the local HQ card when Barnett was acquired with its "Keep Florida green" advertising campaign, and was heavily involved in promoting Jacksonville's bid in the 1993 NFL expansion campaign.  Not until the Wachovia merger did you have a relative disengagement from downtown and from commitment to Jacksonville, or so I thought.

The oil glut and Andrew were beyond the control of Jacksonville companies, but the real missed opportunity for downtown that still annoys me is Barnett's strategic shift when Charlie Rice replaced Guy Botts as CEO.  Botts envisioned acquiring banks in other states and building Barnett into a Jacksonville-based national powerhouse, while Rice pursued a "Florida fortress" strategy that made Barnett dominant within the state and successful with investors, but vulnerable to takeover by the banks that had the vision to expand into multistate empires.  By the time the need to expand out of state through acquisitions became clear, Barnett moved too cautiously and missed major opportunities (MBank in Texas, First American in DC/MD/VA), then settled for an expensive and disastrous purchase of Atlanta banks that it only held onto for a few years.

[thelakelander]

This happened in every city that overbuilt in the 1980s.

We weren't "overbuilt" until we lost the companies using the spaces they had developed for themselves.

They simply leased out floors to other companies (the same thing that they are doing now actually) This wasn't a new strategy to fill a corporate HQ btw.  You could have built ten more towers to accommodate the information based businesses and call centers that dominated the new economy.  But the DDA simply didn't want or understand the needs of those new industries.  We didn't even have a usable T1 connection downtown except for Southern Bell and the City Hall when I moved next door in 1999.

Yes, we were not the only city to suffer from mergers. Such a point was never expressed in the article. In fact, the article provides no solution to the situation. It only highlights how much of the skyline was developed and how we ended up with a glut of empty office space in a relatively short period of time. Any strategy talk on how to fill that space would be a good follow up article itself.

The truth is that the city was too busy giving away 35 million dollars for "The Shipyards" to downtown messiahs like Ed Burr and similarly nonsensical projects (in retrospect) instead of investing in hi tech infrastructure that would have let it survive as a contender past the 1990s.  the southside did not make this mistake (and there weren't any blue ribbon panels operating on the ethos of the 1960s standing around blocking them from investing.

^This is literally every city in the country.

[thelakelander]

I get the sense that after First Union acquired Atlantic and Florida National, the "First Union of Florida" division acted rather autonomously of First Union in NC and made some fairly significant community investments.  It even played the local HQ card when Barnett was acquired with its "Keep Florida green" advertising campaign, and was heavily involved in promoting Jacksonville's bid in the 1993 NFL expansion campaign.  Not until the Wachovia merger did you have a relative disengagement from downtown and from commitment to Jacksonville, or so I thought.

Any idea to reason behind the disengagement? Didn't First Union actually acquire Wachovia?

[Wacca Pilatka]

^ My non-expert perception was that even though First Union acquired Wachovia, after this happened the company shifted from being one in which regional offices had substantial autonomy to one in which all decisions and charitable activities emanated from and benefited greater Charlotte.

[thelakelander]

We were overbuilt.  Its the reason that the Barnett was called Charlie's Dunce Cap.  There wasn't enough interest to fill the building and many assumed it was going to be a financial disaster.

Yes, I can see being overbuilt by the time the Barnett Center was completed. A good number of companies had already been acquired, disappeared or were on the verge of leaving DT altogether by then.