Times-Union Editorial - Impressive Projects Downtwon

[Charles Hunter]

Today (Sunday, Aug. 30) the Times-Union published an editorial praising the level of activity downtown, and the DIA and Lori Boyer for fostering it. 
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/opinion/editorials/2020/08/30/editorial-downtown-development-move-jacksonville-variety-new-projects/3431155001/

You can read the editorial for their reasoning, but the list includes:

The New FIS headquarters in Brooklyn and JEA's new headquarters building.

Restorations: VyStar's renovations ... and parking garage. Plus, VyStar plans to activate street-level spaces with retail and performances. The Ambassador Hotel and the original Independent Life Building are set to be redeveloped. Everything is not being torn down.

Old City Hall, Courthouse: Yes, the grassy areas on the Northbank look bad, but it's important to make sure that new development takes maximum advantage of this blank slate. ...the Spandrel Development. ... The pandemic has delayed negotiations on a term sheet as well as timing.

Jacksonville Landing site ... There probably will be a design competition among architects and the public will be invited to comment.

Pedestrian-friendly additions: The road diet along Riverplace Boulevard is basically completed; and coming will be a similar road diet for Park Street in Brooklyn. The Emerald Trail model mile  ...  Two-way street conversions ... bicycle track along Hogan Street.  A new parking strategy ought to improve Downtown's bad policies.

Parks: Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing Park, the home of James Weldon Johnson in LaVilla, has been funded with help from Vestcor, ... the Friendship Fountain area  ... the McCoys Creek area and will include park spaces.

[Ken_FSU]

The Landing (a grass lot with no budget for redevelopment) and Ford on Bay (a grass lot half tied up in legal dispute, with the other half way past the point where a term sheet on an unimpressive project stemming from a failed RFP was supposed to be signed) should not be included on a "list of impressive projects" downtown.

I've been seeing renders of Friendship Fountain/St. Johns River Park renovations for over two years; nothing yet.

It's also been two years since the Ambassador Hotel conversion was announced, and I haven't seen a human in the building for what's gotta be a year since interior demo completed.

New JEA headquarters I'd call a lateral move at best for downtown, rather than a win. Great that they stayed downtown, but it's a downsized HQ that probably paves the way for the demolition of one of the most architecturally interesting high-rises downtown.

Similarly, the continued development of LaVilla is fantastic, but I have a hard time patting the DIA on the back for the townhouses when a MUCH better option - paying respect to the site's history and adding vibrancy/mixed-use in coordination with one of the areas top restauranteurs - was passed over in favor of an objectively worse plan by Vestcor.

This quote:

Downtown development needed a push to create momentum that would carry it through the next recession... So we fully supported the hiring of Lori Boyer as the next CEO of the Downtown Investment Authority because she had already put into place important downtown projects like a riverfront nodes plan and a series of height restrictions for riverfront buildings... She has fulfilled that potential."

Seems akin to Dave Caldwell saying "It is built" after going 3-13.

Hoping for the best, agree with the analogy of blocking and tackling, I just think it's ludicrous that we should be congratulating ourselves on the state of our downtown and the great promise ahead when restaurants are closing left and right, a major hotel wants out, all of these grand plans exist on paper only (if that), and we're possibly in worse shape now than we were coming out of the last recession. But hey, at least we strung up some Christmas lights on the Acosta Bridge.

[marcuscnelson]

The article is really straining to look on the bright side of things.

FIS is genuinely a good thing, although it's over in Brooklyn. JEA seems like a bit of a stretch to include given it's city-owned.

Vystar coming downtown is great, although it's a hard bargain to call the whole thing a restoration rather than just the Life of the South building. The parking garage they're talking about was supposed to be part of the Trio, right? Feels like they're really counting their chickens on the Ambassador and Independent Life. Also the Hyatt Place seems to have simply vanished at this point.

Yes, the grassy areas on the Northbank look bad, but it's important to make sure that new development takes maximum advantage od this blank slate.

This is just blatantly making excuses. They don't have to take point for Curry.

The Landing was an iconic site with great public interest, before it was reduced to a grass field. They're straight-up guessing that "There probably will be a design competition among architects and the public will be invited to comment." They could have done that a year ago without tearing it down.

A new parking strategy ought to improve Downtown's bad policies.

They seem to just be saying this. This whole article is really less looking for the bright side and more making excuses for messing up basic fundamentals of community redevelopment, and just defending how things have been.

[Lunican]

The Landing is impressive if you're a goat.

[marcuscnelson]

There's also this article from last week:

https://www.jacksonville.com/story/opinion/editorials/2020/08/27/editorial-progress-continues-through-downtown-jacksonville-but-parks-plan-needed/5642205002/

The Downtown riverfront on the Northbank is like a blank page to a writer.

There is a grassy expanse extending from the old Jacksonville Landing site all the way to Metropolitan Park in the Stadium District.

No question, other peer cities with less potential than Jacksonville have redeveloped their downtowns into go-to places. J magazine, the former quarterly publication of the Times-Union Editorial Page, documented that fact.

But there is hope. It all comes down to leadership. With Lori Boyer leading the Downtown Investment Authority as its chief operating officer, there is hope.

[thelakelander]

Lol, this editorial makes quite a few reaches. It's actually one of the worst positions to apply to downtown's situation. Instead of holding people accountable for bad decisions, it makes excuses for certain outcomes and attempts to polish a turd of a result after a full decade of national economic prosperity. It lost me just as soon as two projects that have not broken ground (Independent Life and Ambassador) were used to suggest that not everything is being torn down.

Also no need to spin wasting tens of millions on the demolition of the Landing and Courthouse sites in a positive light. Was at the office again this Friday and the place was dead as a can be. You can't claim impressiveness without directly comparing it to something of similar scale. It's like they completely ignored local history by counting on things that have not broken ground to materialize. A design competition for the Landing site? That's the bright idea? Didn't we do this during the Alvin Brown administration? Brian Hughes used the last design as a tool to suggest no public involvement was needed to evict tenants and tear down the structure. At this rate, we might was well throw the Shipyards and the District on the success list too. At the end of the day, it's okay to admit that we've made some horrible decisions the last few years and that we're actively working to be better.

We'd be better off pointing out the couple of positives, highlighting how we can build off of them, while also zeroing in on the mistakes to ensure we limit ourselves from doing the same thing in the future.

[heights unknown]

"Probably" relative to the design competition for the Landing site; we know what that means. It MIGHT never happen. I don't know why they are patting her on the back; nothing is going on in DT Jax...NOTHING. You don't pat people on their backs for dreams, wishes, proposals, paper plans, you pat them on the back when everything has successfully come to fruition, been built, and is successful. Sheesh!!!

[Ken_FSU]

Short term, I wish the DIA would forget about the riverfront pie-in-the-sky projects for a year or two and put 100% of their focus and incentives into jump starting the following projects before the bottom fully falls out on the economy:

1) Laura Street Trio
2) Jones Bros Furniture
3) Ambassasor Hotel
4) Independent Life
5) Federal Reserve Building
6) 218 W. Church St.
7) Chamblin's Restaurant/Apartments
8 ) Laura Street Garage/Retail
9) Hemming Park upgrades
10) Northbank facade improvements & restaurant grants

Get those few blocks right and get some of these long-promised projects going, and you've genuinely got something you can build off of while you wait for Shad Khan and Hyatt and Spandrel and everyone else to figure their shit out.

[thelakelander]

I agree. I'd add the Porter House Mansion block that JWB just purchased to this list as well.

[jaxlongtimer]

When the T-U was publishing J magazine, they were scaping the bottom of the barrel for articles with positive and optimistic outlooks on Downtown, many of them rehashes of worn-out promises of years past.   I would suggest the magazine didn't survive because all that cheer-leading was just that - there was a lack of substance to measure up to it.  So for the T-U to continue that train of thought seems to me to be "crying over their beer" at the demise of J magazine's premise and sustainability thereof.

Regardless of the owner, editor or reality, the T-U has always been a big cheerleader for Downtown.  I salute their service to civic duty and credit them for explaining to suburbanites and country folk why they should care for and support Downtown.  Unfortunately, this unabashed approach has created decades of false hopes and now has jaded most of the populace of the City and its surroundings leading to a typical response of an eye roll (see the parable of the boy who cried wolf!).

As noted here, if the T-U and other influencers would offer constructive criticism and hold appropriate officials accountable for our failure to keep up with peer cities, we would likely be much further along in developing the urban core.  Too many people who control the fate of Downtown are spending way too much time self-congratulating themselves for meaningless announcements, broken promises, low probability or unsustainable projects, minuscule and over-hyped advancements, misdirected subsidies and investments, short term over long term initiatives, etc. instead of addressing the hard core underlying reasons why Downtown is falling forever behind other central business districts of every size, location and kind around the country.

Until someone "shows us the beef," don't expect to find much excitement over these types of editorials.

P.S. The T-U "failed" to mention these Downtown happenings:

Loss of up to 500 jobs at Stein Mart HQ's.
Khan letting his development agreement lapse for the Shipyards and dragging his feet on Lot J.
Rummel's District failing to break ground and possibly following Khan's Shipyard lead.
Downsizing JEA HQ's.
Omni likely going downscale upon sale.
Restaurants and bars treading water if that.
Continued destruction of the City's historic buildings with no replacements other than grass fields and illegal parking lots.
The arrival of a suburban style gas station because Downtown land isn't useful for real downtown style developments.
The failure of the City to address resiliency to flooding.
The failure to maintain parks and streets that are crumbling everywhere you look.
The lack of robust urban core mass transit (i.e. not the flyers to the suburbs) and the failed Skyway.
The failure of Downtown to connect with surrounding neighborhoods.
The failure to advance the traditional Downtown on the Northbank vs. Brooklyn and San Marco/Southbank for which City leaders deserve little credit.  In reality, the successes in those areas are also indications of the failure to properly nurture the Northbank mother-ship.
The collapse of the First Baptist Church and their efforts to develop their properties.
The long term impact of COVID-19 on Downtown.

Subtract the Fidelity/FIS/Black Knight, Vystar and Baptist expansions and Vestcor's heavily subsidized housing projects and what do we have left?  Almost all the major other Fintech announcements (high paying office type jobs that would be ideal for Downtown) have headed to the suburbs.

[marcuscnelson]

Right on the money. Somehow we've relegated ourselves to dead last in Florida cities for so long that we've deluded ourselves into thinking that everything is fine and we're totally on the up and coming, while every other city is speeding generations ahead of us. It's a problem that isn't just about the last 8 years (well, it will be 8 years by the time Curry leaves), but really the last 20, even the last 60 when you think about it.

[jaxlongtimer]

Here is another Downtown tidbit the Times Union editorial overlooked:

https://www.jaxdailyrecord.com/article/hyatt-regency-jacksonville-riverfront-files-another-layoff-notice

[Papa33]

So . . . removal of the Main Street Bridge ramp next year is a given?

[marcuscnelson]

Sounds like it. Early '21.

Can't say I'm opposed to it. Might as well give the next administration the maximum amount of space to try and get something built.

[Steve]

Might as well do the same one on the other side too if you're going to the well.