Is the FTU site locked into a suburban site plan?

[thelakelander]

Here you go!

[Charles Hunter]

That helps, but could you summarize the changes and discuss how you think they make the site plan better or worse? (Sounds like a Jaxson Article!)

[thelakelander]

I haven't taken a deep dive into the plan yet. Just glancing at it, the proposed riverwalk restaurant location is in a better spot than helipad. The amount of space dedicated to accessing the parking garage has been reduced as well. Would still prefer to see it reduced further and the weird shaped apartment amenity building becoming retail, or having a stronger and visible connection between the riverwalk restaurant and the retail/grocery box fronting Riverside Avenue. While there's definitely a dramatic elevation change from Riverside Avenue to the riverwalk, I'd still prefer an option that pushed the grocery store to the left, and that row of parking shifted elsewhere.

In short, Leila Street should be treated like a mixed-use street with as much retail/dining as possible on the ground level between Riverside Avenue and the riverwalk. Think the main street of Tapestry Park.

[jcjohnpaint]

Even if they bumped the tracery one row of parking to the left, providing on street parking would help. Sad the Creek walk is such an afterthought

[Captain Zissou]

Why does that middle East-West strip not connect to the Phase 2 North-South road?  The improvements to this are minimal and it's still a garbage design for this area.  I'm sure the developer can point to the other suburban designed developments that have been approved across the street, but just because those were approved it doesn't make what he's proposing a good site plan.

[thelakelander]

Good question. I assume they don't connect because in this particular design, the roads are at different elevations. It looks like the May Street extension is at a lower grade, based on the grocery store loading docks. It would be good to blow the design up and start over but it appears we're way past that point now unfortunately.

[thelakelander]

Months later, nothing has really changed with the site plan. They just added more bushes in the renderings so you can't see the cars in the graphics. Pretty horrible garage design that basically controls what you can and can't do with the site. Brickell City Center is several times the size of this small project, has garages with thousands of spaces and they don't even need five separate vehicular entrances. If this development could lose two of the five entrances, it would allow for Leila to actually be pedestrian friendly 100% through the property. Those two would be the grocery level garage entrance to the far right....which would allow a few more spaces in the garage and the access road between the grocery and garage to slope down to the secondary May Street entrance. The other would be the basement level garage entrance off Leila Street. Since that level also has an entrance off May, there's no need for two, if you can slope the road between the grocery box and garage down to May Street. As of now, the garage design make the autocentric site layout a self imposed hardship.










Before



After

[Captain Zissou]

That's going to be mayhem in the evenings with people coming home from work and others trying to grab dinner/groceries.  Just a multidirectional log jam with all of those entrances and exits.

[MusicMan]

How long does it take these developers to produce one of the mock ups? How expensive is it?

[thelakelander]

It's really a shame because the market is strong and there is a lot happening...but years from now people will look around and lament at how poorly designed many of these projects are.

You can see it on Riverside Avenue now, a good decade after 220 Riverside was complete. The street and the atmosphere look pretty horrible. It's a great example of what not to do when discussing the future of other urban neighborhoods in Jax, across the state and the country. While it has had its fair share of market rate development and infill, the physical outcome is what one should expect when there's no vision in place of what the overall end game should resemble. History erased, no sense of place, no unique character and dead at the pedestrian scale level despite hundreds of millions in new infill development taking place over the last decade.  One Riverside fits right into this unfortunate scenario. Good to see new development but things could have been significantly better for Brooklyn and Downtown Jax in general if laid out differently.

[fsu813]

Months later, nothing has really changed with the site plan.

In your opinion, why is Fuqua so resistant to making some of the changes you've suggested - cost, time, inconvenience?

[thelakelander]

IMO, they don't need too. At this point, there's no real incentive to create a better product. After months of working on this, whatever previous negotiations they've had with the DIA have already shaped what the project will be. If they get any pushback, just name drop Publix or say the project will die if it's not approved as is (although definitely not true). I have serious doubts either the DIA or the majority of the DDRB will make them do anything more than minor cosmetic changes.

[jaxjags]

This one is on DIA. Original conceptual plans showed grocery at the street. Then all of a sudden the plan changes and it's set in stone. Not the way to do business. Is it time for the DIA/DDRB system to be changed or replaced? Lake, how are other cities systems structured?

[fsu813]

This one is on DIA. Original conceptual plans showed grocery at the street. Then all of a sudden the plan changes and it's set in stone. Not the way to do business. Is it time for the DIA/DDRB system to be changed or replaced? Lake, how are other cities systems structured?

From a layman's perspective, seems like requiring DDRB approval prior to DIA incentives would put the onus on getting the design right.

[fieldafm]

This one is on DIA. Original conceptual plans showed grocery at the street. Then all of a sudden the plan changes and it's set in stone. Not the way to do business. Is it time for the DIA/DDRB system to be changed or replaced? Lake, how are other cities systems structured?

From a layman's perspective, seems like requiring DDRB approval prior to DIA incentives would put the onus on getting the design right.

Seems like amending the zoning code to not allow for surface parking lots fronting a major pedestrian/retail street, and instead requiring such parking to be behind the building (like what is required on Gaines Street as pictured in this article) would provide a better, more clear blueprint for developers from the very beginning of their due diligence process.  This particular site has been under contract since the end of February 2021... so, what you see today did not just happen over the past 30-60 days.

What is maddening, is that the location of the surface parking lots and the number of parking garage entrances proposed here is actually NOT a relief from the existing code. That's insane.

Meanwhile, three blocks away, staff recommended denying a much better surface parking treatment (replacing an ILLEGAL surface parking lot the DIA allowed to be 'temporarily' built) here: https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/brooklyn-projects-show-need-to-define-primary-streets/

I don't blame Fuqua for putting this suburban site plan together.  They clearly put better products out there when they are required to do so.  They aren't required to do so here.... and as such, this is what you get.