The Great Reset: What Will It Mean for Jacksonville?

So Why Should Anyone Want to Move to Jacksonville?  Rebuilding and Enhancing Our Quality of Life



In the post-reset America that Florida describes, younger workers (whose education, talents, and creativity will help transform their destination’s economy) will naturally gravitate to those functional, spatially integrated regions that offer them the most in terms of providing a dense network of career and social opportunities, but they are vitally concerned with other quality of life issues as well.  In describing current research into the location decisions of younger, better educated workers, Florida notes that “In these highly mobile and economically tumultuous times, career success for young people depends on locating themselves in a thick labor market that offers diverse and abundant job opportunities.”  At the same time, however, their prospective jobs were not their highest ranked factor.

“Across the board, the survey respondents said that the ability to meet people and make friends was of paramount importance.  These young people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: that vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and securing personal happiness. … They recognize what psychologists of happiness have shown: it’s not money per se that makes you happy but rather doing exciting work and having fulfilling personal relationships.”  (p. 148, emphasis added)

If these are indeed the attitudes shared by the kinds of younger people who create vibrant, sustainable economies, why, indeed, should people like this want to settle in our smallish, rather isolated region?  Worse, on closer inspection, Jacksonville, the incipient regional core, suffers from so many seemingly intractable problems – lingering divisions across race and income lines (the “two cities” problem), a faltering, equally divided public school system that fails to graduate more than a third of its students, a spatially isolated, dysfunctional downtown core, and the “leadership” of an entrenched political machine that despises planning and whose only concern appears to be lining the pockets of the well-connected political camp followers that congregate around City Hall – that it is sometimes hard to imagine how things might ever be changed.

Perhaps the most hopeful news for Jacksonville, as Florida suggests, is that the road to building stimulating and self-sustaining communities – with the significant exception of creating a functional regional public transit system – does not require significant outlays of cash or expensive, “magic bullet” mega projects.  “Instead of spending millions to lure or bail out factories,” Florida explains, “or hundreds of millions and in some cases billions to build stadiums, convention centers, and hotels, use that money to invest in local assets, spur local business formation and development, better employ local people and utilize their skills, and invest in improving quality of place. (p. 84, emphasis added)          

Some development experts – taking their cues from Jane Jacobs’ pioneering investigation of the most successful and enduring urban ecologies – are heralding the shift away from the old paradigm of vastly expensive mega-development projects (and, as we observe in Jacksonville, their lucrative potential for insider deals and corruption) as a fundamental strategy for preparing for the new post-reset economy.  As one developer relates, “[E]fforts to support local entrepreneurship, build and mature local clusters, develop arts and cultural industries, support local festivals and tourism, attract and retain people – efforts that he and his peers would have jeered at a decade or two ago – a have become the core stuff of economic development.”  (p. 85)