Are Happy Days Returning to Jacksonville?

[Ocklawaha]

Like simms3 has said, Jacksonville is a poor city? Hardly!

Which of these Florida cities â€" Orlando, Tampa, Miami or Jacksonville â€" would you suppose has the highest per capita income?

Which of the three would you guess has the least unemployment? How about the least drop in home prices in the last couple of years?

Finally, which of the three do you suppose is predicted to enjoy the greatest rate of job growth in the coming three years?

If you answered Jacksonville, correctly, to all of those questions, you may be among those who appreciate just how much this area has going for it.

Did you know that within our metro area, St. Johns County, Nassau and Clay are ranked as 4Th, 12Th and 21St in per capita income among the 67 counties in the state of Florida? Our Sawgrass Village area ranks a full 23 cities above Boca Raton in per capita income. Our surrounding communities fare very well in the rankings of 887 Florida towns and cities by income: Crescent Beach 119, Neptune 136, Atlantic 157, Fruit Cove 139 even St Augustine Beach at 169 is ahead of Fort Lauderdale AND Miami Beach.   Jacksonville Beach at number 181, is also in the top 200 cities by income.

So next time someone tells you we come from Florida's poor city, smack them upside the head...

[Tacachale]

Great stuff, simms, thank you.

[simms3]

Well truth be told you can't really compare municipalities in NE FL to others around the state.  Miami is basically a banana republic the size of the very original city limits of Jax from a century ago, but it is so unique as a land of opportunity for immigrants, a playground for foreign investment bankers, and a hotspot for the rich and famous.

Comparing Duval to Orange or Hillsborough Counties works, but comparing one gated community to all of Boca does not.

When I look at secondary cities, mainly in the TX/AZ/CA/NV metros, I notice this is where the wealth base is, yet these secondary cities are close enough to their primary cities as to be equivalently situated within Duval County.  Therefore my conclusion is that a large city like Jacksonville, which incorporates its swaths of wealthy suburban areas, too, in addition to the inner city, should have a higher percentage of wealthy households.  The reality is that far outlying areas attract all the wealth in Jacksonville, not inner ring burbs, the inner core, or even the core county.

This appears to also be true for some of Jacksonville's former peers such as Indy, Nashville, Louisville, and OKC, but is not the case for Charlotte.

If you were to look for some sort of trend corresponding the success of cities to the amount of wealthy and poor people, you could probably spot a trend that the most successful cities attract their wealth base to the city center and sadly keep out most of the poor.  It doesn't take a lot of money to run a rural area, but it's very expensive to upkeep and maintain a successful city.  Tax base is important and the wealthy are the foundation of the base, not only personally with their expensive residences and higher spending habits but also the companies they manage/work for, while the poor eat up resources in the form of social programs.

Jacksonville benefits from a small poor population, but it doesn't have a large tax base.  There's the missing link: increase the tax base by attracting higher paying jobs to the city and work to keep those employees within the city limits instead of PVB, SJC, Nassau/Amelia Island or Clay/Fleming Island.

[ChriswUfGator]

The problem with those figures is that it ranks households, not income for an average job/position. If you have two working parents and some of the kids working, which is very common around here, the 'household' doesn't look poor on paper, but in reality it's a different story with however many mouths they have to feed. A 'household' of one or two people earning $50k or $60k is relatively well-off here, the same income for a household with, say, 6 kids, and you're back to poor in reality even though you look OK on paper. That's why these blanket 'household' comparisons are bunk, 'household' probably means something entirely different here than in Boston or San Francisco, namely I am guessing we have more people per household.

Folks in Jacksonville have a lot of kids relative to other places, and from anecdotal/personal observation they seem to be having them awfully early. Which I guess would tend to indicate that a decent chunk of folks are causing their own problems. Call me nuts, but I think it's irresponsible to have multiple kids when you can barely afford to support yourself, and yet I see so many people doing exactly that here. I personally have no kids, and I won't until I know I can afford to support one. I already make multiples of what most people around here with a bunch of kids make, and I still know enough to know I can't support a child adequately. You have to set money aside for lower edcuation and then college, health insurance, babysitters, transportation, the list is endless. It's basically unfair to the child to turn out another blue-collar worker into a world with dwindling opportunities for them.

Although, to quote judge smails, I guess the world needs ditchdiggers too.

[I-10east]

Thanks Simms for the list. Yeah, that's a common myth that Jax is poor; I knew that had to be offbase.  I'm glad that you cleared that up. It seems like the common theme of what makes cities wealthy are banking, and technology with companies like Dell, Intel, Bank of America, Wells Fargo etc.

[cityimrov]

My biggest problem with Jacksonville and jobs is that the local media and government and chamber always cheerleads these small improvements to make it seem that Jacksonville is the up and coming city in the world.  Add that to the local population that reads Jacksonville is taking New York jobs in the headline and they now think everything we're doing is right and we're going to beat NYC so nothing should change.  That's dangerous.  Jacksonville has a very long history of quitting in the middle of a job (Skyway, Tom Coughlin, Downtown, Courthouse, etc) just when things could have been better.

The numbers and types of jobs I'm seeing come to Jacksonville are average. Yet I see events like this http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php?topic=15073.0 tout these things as the major economic drivers.  They aren't.  They are normal day to day job operations and not a sign that continuing the status quo is a good thing. 

My pet peeve is that almost nothing is made or designed in Jacksonville. Not even my retirement investments (except a token share of CSX) come from Jacksonville!  Jacksonville can do better. 

[Anti redneck]

meh.  I-10 is a bit of a dimwit, imho.

He generally thinks that any and all discussion about how to improve the inner city threatens or condemns his home out in the suburbs somewhere---a bizarre fixation that no one has ever tried to either encourage or discourage.  As Dorothy Parker once famously said, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."

Thanks for the kind words. You say that I'm anti-inner city, that's laughable; I've basically lived nearly my entire life in dense urban environments. In fact, during MJ chat about improving the inner core, I tend to sit back and observe, because I've never claimed to know the intricacies of urban development; What I do know is that the municipal government has to run an entire city, not only DT like you think, talk about a bizarre fixation. I guess that you would be for deconsolidating the city so that ALL of the time and energy can be devoted to the precious lil' urban core. I LOVE urban development more than you would like the think, but I don't have a temper tantrum whatever something profitable is added to the burbs either (like the SJTC). The difference between me and you is that I try to be 50/50 urban/suburban, and you are 100% urban minded total tunnel vision, which isn't realistic for Jax, let alone any city.

hmm.

this post is kind of proof in the pudding I 10.

I said that you considered pro inner city posts as a condemnation of your suburban address and then followed it up with a statement that you had no reason to feel that way based on the editorial board.

Where in my statement did you find that I accused you of being 'anti inner city'?

I didn't.  and if you spent more time reading what is actually said rather than projecting what you suspect that other people secretly think, you would probably get more out of these forums.

Go, Stephen!

[I-10east]

^^^Whatever dude. Stephen said that I think that I think that urban development 'threatens' suburban life, that's so contradictory because it's vice-versa, he thinks that anything suburban threatens urban life. Stephen will now try to spin what he said earlier in 3...2...1... 

[I-10east]

^^^

He generally thinks that any and all discussion about how to improve the inner city threatens or condemns his home out in the suburbs somewhere---

The way it's phrased, it's as if I'm against improving the inner city; No you do not say 'I'm anti-urban' verbatim, but you might as well had. I don't even consider where I live as 'the suburbs', on freaking Lenox Ave, not exactly Argyle Forest. I know that most of yall think that anything west of Riverside in 'the suburbs', but if you was to say I live in 'the suburbs' while referring to Lenox, most people would look at you like you're crazy. Sometimes when the truth is revealed (like the moaning about low paying jobs) it strikes a nerve with people.

[I-10east]

^^^Yeah, play the classic befuddled role.