The Shipyards & Metro Park 2020

[Ken_FSU]

What's the groundbreaking date or anticipated construction timeline? Juvember 2025, 2030 or 2050?

I'm morbidly fascinated by this whole Four Seasons thing.

Just thinking about it logically, there's clearly no universe where Four Seasons would green light a hotel in the middle of a contaminated brownfield in downtown Jacksonville.

But on the other hand, it would be completely insane for Shad Khan to just make the whole thing up and create expensive, unauthorized renders of a Four Seasons hotel at Met Park as well. There's clearly a lot of thought behind this, with the medical component, promenade, and residences.

Neither scenario makes a whole lot of sense.

[thelakelander]

The second scenario makes sense, assuming a lot of things like Lot J, come to fruition and are successful beyond Jax's wildest dreams. The problem is, it could take decades for all the other things to fall in line. For example, Curry's second term is halfway over and we're still not done with the Coastline Drive/Liberty Street demolition and rebuilt. Something as simple and insignificant as that has taken more than half a decade.

[marcuscnelson]

I'll be frank, I wasn't aware of just how high-end Four Seasons was before reading through some recent posts and doing some more research. Obviously I've never stayed in one, but I figured it wasn't completely out of the question. Learning that this hotel chain has a private jet does give me more cause for alarm.

The one objection I'd maybe present is that arguably people would have said the same thing about the NFL green-lighting an expansion team in Jacksonville vs St. Louis or Baltimore. And yet, for whatever reason, they did.

[thelakelander]

^Was it? Where else was the NFL going to go? There are like 50 markets tops in the country that can support a professional sports franchise. A lot of factors from potential ownership team, community support, growth potential and number of existing franchises within these markets would significantly reduce the number of potential suitors left. I don't think it was totally crazy that Jax ended up with a team back then.

However, I also don't believe Four Seasons will be opening up any time soon either. Jax can't support it today but what Khan is trying to sell is a future where it can be supported, assuming many other things, including Lot J happens first. This is likely why timeline has largely been ignored or not seriously covered with this phase.

[minder]

What's the groundbreaking date or anticipated construction timeline? Juvember 2025, 2030 or 2050?

I'm morbidly fascinated by this whole Four Seasons thing.

Just thinking about it logically, there's clearly no universe where Four Seasons would green light a hotel in the middle of a contaminated brownfield in downtown Jacksonville.

But on the other hand, it would be completely insane for Shad Khan to just make the whole thing up and create expensive, unauthorized renders of a Four Seasons hotel at Met Park as well. There's clearly a lot of thought behind this, with the medical component, promenade, and residences.

Neither scenario makes a whole lot of sense.

All the Cordish developments seem to be centred around Loews Hotels, which I think is more within Jacksonville's league currently as a decent brand and also totally reasonable that we could support one. Like the post above, as much as I knew Four Seasons was a luxury brand, I couldn't believe just how expensive it is to stay there, and part of me hopes and reasonably expects they would price rooms accordingly in line with what the market would be willing to pay here. It also baffles me slightly that they want to add then not one but two hotels. One which is very nice and another which is just flat out luxury.

This leads me to believe Khan is swinging for the fences and eyeing another Superbowl IMO. That'll be his next bargaining chip if he faces more opposition from council members etc. "If we can add x amount of high end hotel rooms instead of having people staying on boats....". You know the drill.

[jaxlongtimer]

This leads me to believe Khan is swinging for the fences and eyeing another Superbowl IMO. That'll be his next bargaining chip if he faces more opposition from council members etc. "If we can add x amount of high end hotel rooms instead of having people staying on boats....". You know the drill.

^This would be the absolute worst reason to build the Four Seasons.  We already built one hotel to get a Super Bowl, the Adams Mark (now the Hyatt).  And soon after the SB, it went broke.  The multi-million dollar lights put on the bridges were mostly inoperable within a few short years.  The cruise ships left within days.  What permanent mark other than that struggling hotel was left on Jax by having hosted a SB?  Just memories, not the great long-term transformation of the City boosters promised.

Lessons learned from the amazing crowds at Bay Street (closed the street to host street vendors from the Main Street to the Sports Complex), Shipyards (hosted concerts and a large gathering place), JEA Southbank (now the District) property (hosted NFL Experience) and the Landing and turning the Main Street Bridge into a pedestrian-only pathway connecting both sides of the river?  None!

It would be a fools errand to repeat the experience of spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for a single, fleeting, event that will not impact the City like spending those same dollars on much needed long term investments across the entire community.

[Ken_FSU]

Per Paul Harden at the City Council meeting tonight:

In response to the local skepticism, the CEO of the Four Seasons corporation has personally provided a letter to the City of Jacksonville formally approving and supporting Shad Khan's plan to bring a Four Seasons to Jacksonville.

Solid flex by Khan.

[marcuscnelson]

If Loews comes to Jacksonville at all, I imagine that'd be the hotel at Lot J itself. Lamping has been insisting that Cordish doesn't actually have any role in the Shipyards, only Lot J.

I think there have been talks here about the likelihood of another Super Bowl bid at some point. Although at the pace they're taking with stadium talks I'd be surprised to see it before 2030. Like jaxlongtimer said, I can't help but question whether 3-400 hotel rooms really make the difference they seem to be looking for, considering last time they rushed to build 1000 rooms with the Hyatt in order to make their first bid work.

Per Paul Harden at the City Council meeting tonight:

In response to the local skepticism, the CEO of the Four Seasons corporation has personally provided a letter to the City of Jacksonville formally approving and supporting Shad Khan's plan to bring a Four Seasons to Jacksonville.

Solid flex by Khan.

...seriously? That's... well, huh.

[thelakelander]

LOL, did the letter state when they'd be breaking ground? Did Khan actually show up to the Council meeting?

[marcuscnelson]

Nate Monroe is asking questions.

[CityLife]

Four Seasons does not own or develop any of it's properties. They essentially have a franchise model. They would allow one to be built in Dubuque, Iowa if a developer offered them the right deal.

[marcuscnelson]

Nate Monroe is asking questions.

Big fan of Nate Monroe, but this is the type of stuff that I don't think is particularly constructive.

It's one thing to debate the feasibility of a Four Seasons hotel in downtown Jacksonville, but I'm not a fan of the insinuation that a guy worth $8 billion dollars who already owns a Four Seasons Hotel in Canada (and will soon own a second Canadian Four Seasons) is somehow either lying or being played for a fool by Four Seasons. It's needlessly personal.

Do I think there's a prayer that we see a Four Seasons at Met Park in the next 10 years? Personally, no.

Do I think that Shad Khan genuinely believes that he could bring a successful Four Seasons hotel to downtown Jacksonville?

I actually do, and I think there's something to be said for that.

Lost in all of this debate over what's fair for the public to pay and what's not fair is that the fact that Shad Khan continues to display that belief in the market and that willingness to make the Jags sustainable long-term in Jacksonville, despite his connections to more lucrative markets like London and Toronto.

And it still feels like he can't win with locals.

Donates $1 million to hurricane recovery efforts. Why isn't it $5 million?

Donates $1 million to local covid relief. Why isn't it $10 million?

Jags donate 50,000 masks to front line workers? It's a marketing ploy.

Gives $5 million to MOSH 2.0. Ulterior motives.

Moves a home game to London to boost local revenue and is very transparent about it? Moving the team to London.

Comes out in support of his players expressing their freedom of speech? He's anti-military.

Speaks out against the city privatizing JEA? No one notices.

Asks for public subsidies for Lot J? In bed with the mayor on the JEA sale.

Successful businessman with a massive corporation in Illionois and international business interests throughout the world. Why doesn't he live in Jacksonville?

Solicits a major developer to bring a huge mixed-use development to the sports complex? He's trying to line his own pockets.

Totally get any City Council member wanting to get the best deal possible for the city, but I honestly do think it's acting in bad faith to continually beat the "we have to be protected if the Jags leave the city" drum and discuss the Jags' departure like its a foregone conclusion when the dude really is trying to make it work. Ditto all these public comments with the language about he's a "Con/Khanman." Same carpetbagger shit that Wayne Weaver got back in the early 1990s when he was trying to bring a franchise here.

I think the Jax/Jags relationship can survive some pretty stringent but civil negotiations over any of these projects.

But it just feels like it's getting more and more personal with some of these Council members and locals.

All gets back to how nice it would have been to do things properly and in the daylight, as a package, tied a long-term lease extension and a minimum number of home games in Jacksonville.

I think most people aren't particularly inclined to feel a ton of sympathy for a billionaire. Cut that however you want, but there are people in this city sitting in lines for food, waiting for sewer lines they were promised generations ago, watching their children gunned down in the streets, while they're being asked to open their wallets for a football team. They're not going to give a damn about whether a man who owns a yacht worth nearly as much as all the taxpayer dollars being asked for has his feelings hurt.

That aside, the challenge you're always going to have with having that kind of money is that you didn't give more. There's a reason that famous "what if you win the lottery" post is out there. Especially with a deal like this, people are going to feel like they're getting put over a barrel if they don't ask for every cent they can. The behavior around the JEA headquarters and the subsequent sale attempts certainly didn't help matters, and Curry's behavior has been seriously detrimental to making this work. On top of that, remember all the ancillary costs we are looking at from this project. The Convention Center, the Landing, the Hart ramps, moving Metro Park. It's bigger than just Lot J or the Shipyards themselves, and on top of that we're still looking at the biggest subsidies in our history. It's worth noting that chances are, the people complaining about subsidies or privatizing JEA or the mask donations probably aren't the same people complaining about "anti-military" stuff. It's a big city, and as this recent election proves, a divided city.

Again, I think a lot of this also comes back to Curry's behavior and how the backlash to some of it is landing on this thing that is suspiciously close to Curry. And I absolutely agree, at the end of the day some outright, simple transparency and honesty about what this project was would have been the best thing for everyone. Now that we know more about the issues with remediation, that brings me to a somewhat different idea on how to make things work from here.

[fhrathore]

Crazy to think that a lot of the bad feelings between the city, the citizenry, and the Jaguars over Lot J could be ameliorated if the Jaguars just won more games...

[Ken_FSU]

 

Now that we know more about the issues with remediation, that brings me to a somewhat different idea on how to make things work from here.

To me, the most logical thing is to just all cooperate towards a common goal.

With all of Jacksonville's issues downtown right now, putting all of our eggs into remediating the Shipyards area seems akin to the Jags using a first round pick on a punter when Trevor Lawrence is on the board.

In a fantasy world, this would be my plan:

Get the mayor's office, the Jags, Cordish, and the DIA all in one room.

1) Offer the Jags the full Landing property for Jacksonville Live! component of their project.

2) The Jags are requesting a $12.5 million completion grant for the Lot J Lowe's hotel. Offer them the same $12.5 million in cash toward the purchase and conversion of the Omni, which is going on the market.

3) With the Spandrel deal floundering, offer the Jags the Ford on Bay property free of cost for the residential and retail components of the Lot J proposal. We were going to have to heavily subsidize the property already.

4) Agree to work out a deal with the Hyatt to help them/Jacobs kickstart a market appropriate convention center to feed into Live!

5) Agree to run shuttles or buses or a Jags-themed trolly or water taxi or whatever from Live! down Bay Street to the sports complex on all game days and concert days so you've got that same synergy they're looking for.

6) Identify other city owned or blighted property that we can work with the Jags on for future expansion.

Feels like everyone wins in this scenario.

The Jags get better property, in an area with the density and population base necessary to make them viable. They can charge higher rents for the riverfront residential. They can take advantage of the existing downtown worker and residential base to keep the bars and restaurants filled. And this would actually be much closer to the Kansas City Cordish model.

The downtown core and existing businesses in the CBD win, for all of the clustering of complimentary uses in a compact pedestrian setting reasons we've been hearing for 15 years here.

The taxpayers get a better deal than what's currently proposed, as even if we still end up spending $200 million, we've got more of that money working toward tangible, strategic uses instead of dumping debt into filling in retention ponds, remediating and moving functional parking lots, and spending half a billion dollars moving a prison just to set the scene for a future convention center.

There's no reason the Met Park and Shipyards stuff can't work itself out down the line, but the above is logical, immediate, and mutually beneficial for all parties, while what's currently proposed might take a decade to come to fruition and exists in a vacuum.

[thelakelander]

I wouldn't mind seeing the Jag's shift their investments to these Northbank properties but it seems like their entire proposal is for the purpose of having these uses around the stadium itself. Are there any examples of sports teams making these investments in other areas of their respective host cities, as opposed to being adjacent to the sports facility?