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By Abel Harding
In the heart of Jacksonville's Sherwood Forest neighborhood, the only supermarket is closing - again.
The "70 percent off" signs and bare shelves at the Bravo Supermarket mirror the dashed hopes of residents, who face double-digit unemployment and one of the city's highest poverty rates.
They'd been promised better days ahead.
Charlemagne Brown, one of a handful of bargain-hunters who turned out to roam the aisles of the now-shuttered grocery, could only shrug and call it a shame.
"It was nice to have a grocery store so close," she said. "And the jobs. We needed those jobs."
Bravo, which closed the first time late last summer, reopened months later as the anchor of the refurbished Shoppes of Norfolk - a strip center on Soutel Drive.
More than $1.4 million in grants and loans from the Northwest Jacksonville Economic Development Trust Fund were invested in the project, which promised to create 50 jobs. But the center today, pockmarked with empty storefronts, is struggling. Other strip centers in the area are also hanging on, staying afloat with day cares and churches as tenants.
Originally platted in the early 1900s, Sherwood Forest was settled after World War II. Bound by the Trout River to the north and the Ribault on the south, the neighborhood's neatly arranged streets are dotted with parks and single-story, cinder-block homes.
Emboldened by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, African-Americans in search of better housing flocked to neighborhoods like Sherwood Forest, only to see white residents flee, leaving behind rental properties and abandoned buildings with absentee owners.
full article: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2010-03-28/story/depressed-sherwood-forest-promised-jobs-remain-illusion