Reinvigorating the Jacksonville Landing

[thelakelander]

Yeah, that's the crux of the issue. A close friend of mine moved here from Albuquerque and lived in a downtown apartment her first year in town.  After her lease was up, she decided to move to Tapestry Park and commute to downtown for work. In her opinion, that general area of town and the development itself offered more to her than living in the Northbank and driving out to enjoy the benefits one would expect with urban living.

Also, I agree with Jeffrey in that increasing residential in the Northbank to the point where it can drive a real retail market in the short term (less than 10 years) is wishful thinking. It takes most of these projects years to get off the ground and you'll need thousands of additional units for downtown to have a retail market supported only by places in the Northbank.

Jax should steal a page out of nearly every other American peer city's playbook and invest in mass transit as an economic stimulant. We have +75k people living within a three mile radius of DT right now. Some of the most popular urban districts in the state are within a mile of DT. Why we continue to overlook the importance of connecting them with downtown is puzzling to me. By all means, yes more residential in the Northbank is very important and should be considered a priority.  However, let's take advantage of the +75k residing around it to help feed desired infill that's still a good decade away from having any realistic major impact on vibrancy.

[Bolles_Bull]

Yeah, that's the crux of the issue. A close friend of mine moved here from Albuquerque and lived in a downtown apartment her first year in town.  After her lease was up, she decided to move to Tapestry Park and commute to downtown for work. In her opinion, that general area of town and the development itself offered more to her than living in the Northbank and driving out to enjoy the benefits one would expect with urban living.

Also, I agree with Jeffrey in that increasing residential in the Northbank to the point where it can drive a real retail market in the short term (less than 10 years) is wishful thinking. It takes most of these projects years to get off the ground and you'll need thousands of additional units for downtown to have a retail market supported only by places in the Northbank.

Jax should steal a page out of nearly every other American peer city's playbook and invest in mass transit as an economic stimulant. We have +75k people living within a three mile radius of DT right now. Some of the most popular urban districts in the state are within a mile of DT. Why we continue to overlook the importance of connecting them with downtown is puzzling to me. By all means, yes more residential in the Northbank is very important and should be considered a priority.  However, let's take advantage of the +75k residing around it to help feed desired infill that's still a good decade away from having any realistic major impact on vibrancy.

Bingo, instant access to all amenities of surrounding neighborhoods without having to use your car would give the biggest ROI in improving QOL factors that drives housing demand.  Next on the list would be replacing meters with 2 hr limit signs, getting a CVS and urban layout grocery store withing walking distance like DT orlando has now.

I cant understand how avondale/murray hill shouldnt obviously already connect thru DT to springfield via streetcar, with the skyway extending down to san marco. Its such a no brainer.

[thelakelander]

Unfortunately, we've screwed the pooch with the urban grocery. We had a change with the proposed Brooklyn Fresh Market but allowed a pretty suburban layout. Between that, the existing Northbank Winn-Dixie, Five Points' Publix and San Marco's proposed Publix, we may be waiting a long time for the market to support another grocery store.

[JaxArchitect]

Maybe it's just me, but the actual Landing signage on the outer horseshoe is one of the more iconic features of the waterfront.

That's a great comment!
The signage is iconic and will unfortunately go away with the renovation.  Although the existing curved sign most likely won't work on the new building design, I think they could still find a way to create a similarly iconic signage design for the new footprint that has a similar scale and impact from the river.

[thelakelander]

Could you repurpose the existing iconic sign to wrap the proposed parking lot facing the curving Independent Drive or would that be against the sign ordinance?

[TomHurst]

Lots of posts debating the chicken or egg theory of housing vs retail.  The reality is that both are somewhat correct and they both need to be nurtured and incentivized until they are self-sustaining.
However, the old adage that retail follows rooftops is accurate.  Retail, restaurants, bars, and other sources of activity just won't work on their own unless they have a customer base.  This is the main reason why the Landing has deteriorated over 25 years, because it cannot sustain itself solely as a destination retail/restaurant location isolated from our population centers.  No amount of renovation or physical improvements will make a long-term difference unless they have this built-in customer base close by....and office workers don't count nearly as much as residents.
If you look at the precedent of many other major cities that have undergone revitalization, it all started with refocusing on developing residential first and foremost.
My personal experience is from living in Cleveland in the 1990's.  When I first started working there in 1991, it was a ghost town after hours just like Jax.  The catalyst that changed the city was the introduction of thousands or new residents downtown through the renovation of old industrial warehouses.  Although there were bars and some restaurants before, most of this residential came before any significant rejuvenation of the retail/restaurant market.  Once they got around 5,000 residents downtown, the restaurants, bars, coffee shops, corner markets, dry cleaners, etc all just sprouted up because these businesses all of a sudden were no-brainers. In about ten years, the city added almost 10,000 residents downtown (they have about 12,000 now and are adding another 2000 units in next two years).
There is no reason to think that we cannot do the same thing here but it needs to start with residences.

[ProjectMaximus]

Supposing a grand influx of residents is the catalyst/solution...I again ask how do you achieve this? How do you attract residents to downtown considering the prices they will have to pay...or how do you attract residential developers to downtown considering the money they are likely to lose?

Lake has often referenced the coalition of private companies in Detroit that has created rebate incentives for new downtown residents. That seems to be a good solution though only viable if we have the private entities willing to step up. If 220 riverside and the Brooklyn riverside prove to be financially successful then we might have another blueprint, though I'm anxious to see what the eventual price points and occupancy will be.

[thelakelander]

Although the Landing was never designed to cater to just a Northbank population base, I agree that retail does follow rooftops. However, I'd argue there are rooftops already in place that can be taken advantage of immediately through stronger connectivity with adjacent neighborhoods while we work on attracting more residential to the Northbank and other areas we've ripped apart like Brooklyn and LaVilla. One of the keys for us is to acknowledge that there is a population base on the fringe of the imaginary circle we call downtown now.

When I look at Cleveland, it had some things going for it that provided some of that connectivity, even as far back as the 1990s. For one, even though the CBD may have been dead at night, the city's urban core still had a population density of nearly 7,000 people per square mile, all of which was connected to DT via a public transit rail system that never went away. In addition, it had significantly more available building stock at all sorts of shapes, sizes and price points and a decent sized university in CSU on the eastern edge.

While Cleveland benefited from urban pioneers in the warehouse district like many other cities in the 1990s, we labeled our downtown counterpart as blight and tore it down, killing the redevelopment opportunity that springs so many revitalization efforts across the country.  Now we're seeing another warehouse district come to life with stuff people wanted in the Northbank, it just happens to be where the cheap buildings (CoRK Arts District) are still standing, which is about two miles SW of DT.

When you look at transit, the corridor Cleveland's Red Line runs down has been used continuously for transit since 1920.  The Red Line is actually the first rail transit link between a downtown and airport in the country. Union Terminal never closed down either and became Cleveland's version of the Landing with the opening of the mall inside the terminal in 1990.

On the flip end, we killed our connectivity with other areas of town in 1936, added a Skyway 50 years later but forgot the importance of integrating supportive land use policy with it and tying it into areas where people already live. We also totally shut down our large passenger rail terminal in 1974. To make connectivity worse, we made people pay tolls to get to and from downtown. Jax could literally write a book on how to destroy a downtown well into the 2000s (most cities began to turn around in the 1990s).

Overall, when I look at the Cleveland, what really stands out to me are the things like having an abundance of cheap available building stock to utilize for adaptive reuse, a passenger rail terminal (providing a direct link to the airport) as an anchor that never left and connectivity between DT and other neighborhoods via mass transit. Not that we can't come back but we have to overcome some challenges that were actually opportunities and assets for Cleveland's downtown rebirth.

[thelakelander]

Supposing a grand influx of residents is the catalyst/solution...I again ask how do you achieve this? How do you attract residents to downtown considering the prices they will have to pay...or how do you attract residential developers to downtown considering the money they are likely to lose?

Easy. You bend over and give away the house for five to ten years with a long term goal of all the properties and people you incentivize eventually having to pay property taxes down the road. That method has certainly worked for places like Center City Philly and Uptown Charlotte and now Detroit seems to be benefiting from a similar approach.

[tufsu1]

I can afford most housing options currently being offered downtown.  I chose not to live there b/c you have all of the inconveniences of urban living... and none of the benefits.  Friends of mine that live downtown drive over to 5 Points to shop at Publix, or eat dinner at someplace not named Burrito Gallery or Fionn MacCools.  That's not really an environment where people want to live.  That's the crux of the issue to me.

I chose to live downtown for 3 reasons

1.  I'm an urban planner and it was time to put money where my mouth is
2. The potential
3. Central location with easy access to the great core neighborhoods

For now, #3 is the one that needs to be sold to potential buyers/renters downtown

[mtraininjax]

Jax should steal a page out of nearly every other American peer city's playbook and invest in mass transit as an economic stimulant. We have +75k people living within a three mile radius of DT right now. Some of the most popular urban districts in the state are within a mile of DT. Why we continue to overlook the importance of connecting them with downtown is puzzling to me. By all means, yes more residential in the Northbank is very important and should be considered a priority.  However, let's take advantage of the +75k residing around it to help feed desired infill that's still a good decade away from having any realistic major impact on vibrancy.

The Riverside Avondale trolley will not take anyone downtown, because, well, there is nothing really to go see in comparison to the route in R and A. Not to say it cannot be expanded when 220 is built,  or if and when Forest Street/Brooklyn fills in, but baby steps for now, let's get the RA trolley functional, then we can look at expansion, but DT needs more to offer someone from R or A, to make it worth the ride. The Landing alone is not enough for me to venture downtown.

You could always call up the mayor, put a TV Camera on him and have him discuss his downtown vision. Everyone says he has great plans for downtown.....

[thelakelander]

Yeah, the Riverside Trolley PCT (Potato Chip Truck) isn't what I was describing. That's not going to be a catalyst for supporting economic development.

[TomHurst]

Lake, you're right about a lot of the points you make.  Improving our transit system and connections is incredibly important to improving downtown.  While the transit system in Cleveland is much more robust than Jax and certainly helped to support the development of downtown, it had been robust during the entire period between the 60's and the early 90's also during the period that Cleveland was declining.  Cleveland also had inner ring suburbs with lots of residents (many more than Springfield/San Marco/Riverside) but that also didn't spur development downtown.  It was the introduction of residential in the heart of downtown that made the difference.
The reality is that there is no one magic bullet. Transit, housing, retail all need to be improved and it's going to take some pioneers to take a chance on downtown.  The demand is there, around 95% residential occupancy rate downtown, and market studies have shown there is significant interest in living downtown if there were more residential options and more things to do downtown.  We need to work on all of these aspects and if we do, we'll eventually reach a point where they'll feed off each other and not need any more incentives or public financial support.

[Noone]

Sleiman will sell the rights of the signage and Pepsi will call it the "The Jacksonville Landing, Pepsi docks"

That's making Waves!

[vicupstate]

Has Sleiman made any mention of why he didn't just dust-off the earlier 'it's about time' plans and just pick up where he left off?