Is Jacksonville Serious about helping Small Business Owners?

[Metro Jacksonville]

Is Jacksonville Serious about helping Small Business Owners?

During the final months of Mayor John Delaney’s administration, the city announced plans for the Bay Street Town Center, four blocks on Bay Street that would be enhanced with better lighting, wider sidewalks with pavers, and hopefully many small businesses to make the area a destination for both Jacksonville residents and visitors.  Nearly four years later, the sidewalks have been redone on one side of the street (completing half of the plan is par for the course for a Jacksonville capital project) but private entrepreneurs have been slow to follow, and many of the storefronts still sit vacant.

Full Article
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/content/view/347

[JJ]

Looking at the first picture, the one with the empty storefronts, I got to thinking. Imagine if there was diagonal parking right in front there. Similar to what is in Five Points.

[thelakelander]

Believe it or not, this area will lose a majority of it's on-street parallel parking spaces because JTA plans to run BRT lanes down Bay.  So imagine eating at a sidewalk cafe on those nice new wide sidewalks, with JTA city buses blowing by on a continuous basis.  Makes you wonder, what effect that will have on a entertainment district, already struggling to attract a critical mass of bars and restuarants.

[urbanjacksonville]

Flog has a post on Inside Golf that is very relevant to this post and I Karen Mathis also wrote a tangentially related piece on this in the TU:

Downtown, one fewer golf course (Flog)
Downtown study can't sit on shelf (TU)

[urbanjacksonville]

http://www.folioweekly.com/folioblog/?p=193
http://www.jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/021707/bum_8041650.shtml