Sights and Scenes: Pearl Square Construction

[MakeDTjaxGre@tAgain]

Believe me, I get it. The Trio is a project that should've been done over a decade ago. The ball is slowly starting the roll again and it's a good thing from a resurrection standpoint to get that part of DT going.

The can both are catalyst in their own way depending on who you ask.

But take a look at any new master plan development around the city right now. They are all anchored by a Publix because Publix is a draw. Even established neighborhood such as Alta and YB recently got a Publix a few years back. People want Publix and it's not a make or break, but it's up there.

Publix downtown will have ton of foot traffic and on gamedays, you can simply pick up anything you forgot within minutes for example. The other grocers you mentioned are nice to have.

[jaxlongtimer]

The Chamber should be scrutinized a lot more for the work it does, or doesn't do.  City leaders should be told that they need to prioritize job growth more.  We give $30-50M to individual apartment buildings, but that same money is probably enough to lure a decent sized company to our city that will hire and bring people with it and create a ripple effect.  We need the renters first, and then these apartments will come.

I feel the Chamber is mostly a tool of developers and those who make dollars off of their projects - land owners, real estate brokers, bankers, contractors, subcontractors, architects, engineers, consultants, etc.  As such, they appear to support attracting companies oriented toward locating in the suburbs over Downtown.  With high office vacancy rates currently, the complexity and new investment needed to add more office workers doesn't compare to a giant distribution warehouse, industrial facility like manufacturing and assembly, etc.  Noting too, that most office buildings are owned by out of town investment funds, not local interests that lobby everyday for their share of the economic pie.

Along these lines, the Chamber seems to focus as much or more on enriching existing businesses living off the government teat (incentives, benefits from road expansions, big local infrastructure projects that favor local vendors, etc.) than attracting new ones to compete with those already here for customers, labor, etc.

Not saying the Chamber doesn't successfully attract new businesses,  I just think that agenda gets watered down with their other interests.  In fairness, the Chamber's membership is local businesses so they have to cater to their priorities as much as anything else. 

The ideal touchpoint for attracting new businesses should be the City's Office of Economic Development which should be agnostic to what businesses they cater to for moving here or expanding if already here.

[Ken_FSU]

Really interesting breakdown of the Publix situation here. Gives me more confidence than the Daily Record article, which leaves out a lot of key context. Really happy to see all parties working together to come up with a solution. No threats from either side. Just constructive problem solving.

https://jaxtoday.org/2026/08/05/incentives-downtown-jacksonville-publix/

[thelakelander]

^Good article. Glad to see it.

[jcjohnpaint]

Not sure if this link will work
https://youtu.be/4jJBD_F3XKg?is=4mwYEwGavxrgDPGr

Personally, I just don't see any great companies relocating here at this time, no matter how much money we throw at them. Keep investing in DT north core for a few more years and maybe we will be in a better place. At this time, we are not on the radar.  I don't think it is only Publix, but realizing what a serious developer that is actually doing something can make happen.

[Ken_FSU]

Personally, I just don't see any great companies relocating here at this time, no matter how much money we throw at them.

I asked the AI slop machine who we should target, just to see what would come back. Interesting list.

Screening criteria

A prospect scores well if it hits most of these:

1. 200–1,500 employees. Big enough to matter, small enough that one board vote moves it.
2. HQ in CA, NY, NJ, MA, IL, or CT. Where the cost savings is most significant.
3. Ops-heavy, not client-facing. Work that doesn't require sitting near capital or customers.
4. Founder- or PE-controlled. Widely-held public companies rarely move; concentrated ownership does.
5. A lease expiring in 24–48 months, or a facility decision already pending.
6. Existing Southeast footprint — a plant, a data center, a service center. Nobody moves cold.
7. Cost pressure visible in filings — margin compression, restructuring, "operational efficiency" language.
8. A pre-existing Florida tie — an exec who lives there, a board member, a university connection.

The list

Fintech / payments / insurtech — leverage FIS, Dun & Bradstreet, Nymbus, Paysafe as proof

Payoneer (NYC) — cross-border payments; LatAm/Caribbean trade orientation matches JAX's port geography
Flywire (Boston) — payments ops scale poorly at Boston wage rates
Marqeta (Oakland) — card issuing; Bay Area cost structure is the pitch
Lemonade (NYC) — insurtech claims/service ops are exactly what Jacksonville absorbs well
Better Home & Finance (NYC) — mortgage tech with a cost problem and Manhattan rent
Cross River Bank (Fort Lee, NJ) — fintech-bank infrastructure; NJ tax and comp exposure
Deluxe Corp (Minneapolis) — legacy payments; long-running cost-transformation story

Logistics / port / e-commerce — leverage JAXPORT, I-95/I-10, megasites

Hyundai Glovis America (Irvine, CA) — auto logistics; the Savannah Metaplant corridor makes Northeast Florida the obvious center of gravity
GXO Logistics (Greenwich, CT) — enormous distribution footprint run from one of the most expensive HQ zip codes in America
Hub Group (Oak Brook, IL) — intermodal; Illinois tax and an increasingly Southeast-weighted network
SEKO Logistics (Itasca, IL) — PE-backed freight forwarder, e-comm heavy
NFI Industries (Camden, NJ) — family-controlled 3PL, which makes a move actually decidable
Lineage (Novi, MI) — cold chain; Florida produce and protein volumes support a southern ops HQ

Space / aerospace / defense — leverage Cecil Spaceport, Redwire, Otto, Star Catcher, $12B military base

Astranis (San Francisco) — satellite manufacturing at SF occupancy cost is the least defensible math in the sector
Impulse Space (El Segundo) — in-space mobility; Redwire and Star Catcher give it peers on the ground
K2 Space (Torrance) — large satellites need floor space California charges dearly for
Vast (Long Beach) — station hardware; proximity to Cape launch cadence is a real argument
Ursa Major (Berthoud, CO) — propulsion; test infrastructure and Cecil's acreage fit
AAR Corp (Wood Dale, IL) — MRO; Cecil already hosts heavy maintenance, and Illinois is the push factor
StandardAero (Scottsdale) — same MRO logic, PE lineage, East Coast gap in its network

Ophthalmic and medical device — the most defensible cluster pitch Jacksonville has

CooperVision (San Ramon, CA) — contact lenses; J&J Vision's 30-year presence means the talent already exists
STAAR Surgical (Lake Forest, CA) — ophthalmic implants; small, cost-sensitive, perfect cluster fit
Glaukos (Aliso Viejo, CA) — glaucoma devices; same adjacency, same California cost problem
Sight Sciences (Menlo Park, CA) — small enough to move, ophthalmic enough to belong
Bausch + Lomb U.S. commercial ops (Bridgewater, NJ) — a business-unit relocation, not a full HQ, which is the realistic ask
How I'd rank them

The ophthalmic five are the highest-conviction group — Jacksonville can make an argument there that no other metro can make, because the labor pool literally already exists. Hyundai Glovis and AAR are the highest-expected-value single targets. The space names are the highest-variance: several will move somewhere in the next three years, but Jacksonville is competing with Cape Canaveral, Huntsville, and Texas for each one.

The fintech names are the most plausible and the least differentiated — Jacksonville's pitch there is largely "cheaper," which Charlotte, Tampa, and Nashville also say.

[simms3]

I mean that's pretty impressive.  I'm not going to say everything I want to say, but if I were in JaxUSA I would be utilizing that AI to come up with a focus.  They definitely aligned themselves around a similar focus in the not so distant past, but some of those folks have moved on and I just haven't heard anything in a while about what we want to attract.

I work in the real estate world, for a larger firm, so I hear a lot about relocations and expansions happening all over.  I'm on Costar and so many other sites every day.  I do feel like Jacksonville gets left behind - I hear about activity in pretty much every other city around us, it feels like.  I certainly wish we were "in" more headlines.

I do believe everything we want from downtown development onwards would flow downwards from a better job market here, which could be made better by corporate expansion and relocation.