Jacksonville fights to keep fleeing young professionals

[fsquid]

Judt weird that young professionals flee and existing ones come here

[fsquid]

Thanks, I've even heard that there are black ones and gay ones too.

[finehoe]

St Johns schools are also the best in the state.

Is this true?  I don't know one way or the other, but I would like to see some documentation to back it up.  The best in the state is quite an achievement.

[fsquid]

https://app2.fldoe.org/Ranking/Districts/

[fieldafm]

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-07-26/in-detroit-urban-flight-in-reverse

Great article on how Detroit is working on solutions in its downtown area, called Midtown. Interesting that Whole Foods decided to invest in a store downtown, only after the area had more than 5,000 housing units occupied.

What was cooler was that he downtown businesses helped subsidize the living downtown. Is there this kind of investment by the downtown businesses here in Jacksonville? Does Blue Cross offer its employees money for renting downtown? Fidelity?

Florida Blue's campus is on the Southside... so they have no incentive at all to subsidize people living downtown.

But that's part of Detroit's 15x15 initiative (talked about earlier in this thread).

Like Lake mentioned, they are focusing on a larger area that includes places like Midtown (which is a great place to invest nowadays) and Eastern Market.

Residential demand is very high in these areas and now supply is trying to catch up with it.

You see that in Jax with the soon-to-be multi family starts in Brooklyn.  I can really see places like Brooklyn and North San Marco (especially with the new design standards set forth in San Marco By Design) become hot places for things like loft conversions, urban big box retailers (A place like Kings Ave already has the demographics depending on how you want to source your sphere and will have direct highway access once the Overland project is complete), mixed use multi family developments, etc.

A city's cost of living is great, but it is meaningless if residents do not see any value to making a home there.

Totally agree.  I gave the example of my two cousins earlier.  I have a much higher standard of living than both of them, however they would never want to leave to come here. 

People sort themselves into places not just where they can find work, but they also seek environments where they can pursue their personal interests as well.

Even in Chicago, the Loop is directly impacted by its connectivity with vibrant neighborhoods like Wicker Park and Lakeview. While it would be great to see thousands of residential units in the Northbank, realistically that will take decades and billions to pull off. On the flip end, spend $50 million to provide connectivity between DT and districts like Durkeeville, San Marco, Riverside, etc. and you immediately tie in over 100,000 residents. The synergy between the districts will then naturally drive market rate redevelopment in downtown and the surrounding urban districts.

+100
The connectivity and relationship b/w Lakeview and Wicker Park with the greater urban area of Chicago are a particularly relevant discussion when it comes to comparing places like Downtown Jax and Riverside/Avondale, etc.

[Tacachale]

St Johns schools are also the best in the state.

Is this true?  I don't know one way or the other, but I would like to see some documentation to back it up.  The best in the state is quite an achievement.

The St. Johns County School District is consistently ranked as the best in the state by the types of people who care about things like ranking school districts. As fsquid linked to, the Florida Department of Education ranked the districts based on test scores. This is not a great measure, but it's a measure, and one thing that matters to people who choose their neighborhoods based on its schools.

https://app2.fldoe.org/Ranking/Districts/

By the FDOE ranking, St. Johns was at the top by a substantial margin. It's not particularly surprising when you look at the rankings overall: it's a very wealthy, largely white suburban county, with a lot of new growth and new schools, and a majority populace who clearly value education. Moving down the list are Santa Rosa County (a wealthy, mostly white suburb of Pensacola), Martin County (a very wealthy, mostly white exurb of Miami), Sarasota County, (the wealthy, mostly white county containing, obviously, Sarasota), Gilchrist County (a very small, mostly white rural county) Okaloosa County (the wealthy, mostly white county containing Ft. Walton Beach and Destin) and Seminole County (a wealthy, mostly white suburb of Orlando).

I don't know how any of this affects "young professionals", who are conceivably less likely to have school-age kids than folks a bit older than them. Cline once said the Jacksonville area has become a mecca for established 30- and 40-something professionals with families. That's a very important demographic, but I don't think they have quite the pioneering spirit and creative energy that younger people do, particularly when so many of them live the next county over.