The Great Reset: What Will It Mean for Jacksonville?

What, Now?


 
Aside from all of the remedial, community-building work that will be required to replicate the functional regional ecologies of more economically successful areas, Northeast Florida still boasts a superb natural environment that may serve to help attract the kinds of creative residents that it needs to grow and prosper.  The problem is, if we continue to insist upon seeing this unique natural heritage as merely the backdrop (to be bulldozed for more McMansions, strip malls and Big Box stores whenever our politicians deem it necessary) for more dysfunctional suburban growth for growth’s sake as opposed to an actual attractant, then we are condemning ourselves – as strongly implied by Florida’s narrative – to become a permanent economic and social backwater.  Likewise, Jacksonville’s continual failure to embrace progressive, pro-active planning has already cost us dearly in our competition with other cities, and bodes to cause even more harm in a reset environment.  

Similarly, Jacksonville has a rich (if mostly ignored) culture of diversity in which people form all over the world have helped to create many of our must cherished local institutions.  Building on this heritage – or rebuilding as in the case of LaVilla –Jacksonville stands ready either to emulate the success of other creative cosmopolitan centers such as Tampa, New Orleans, and Atlanta, or to become even more divided and dysfunctional in the future.  Again, we do not need any more magic bullets (courtesy of the JEDC) and grand, graft-ridden urban development schemes to make this happen.  Rather, we need the kind of creative, human scale, neighborhood-building development efforts that Florida describes.    

Finally, what is needed in Jacksonville – more than anything else – is a change in its traditional political leadership.  For the well-entrenched Powers That Be, no matter how Jacksonville might falter in the Great Reset, their pockets will always be filled and their luxurious lifestyle will never be compromised.  For the rest of us, however, our future as a successful and sustainable community is directly linked to a new leadership that has both the understanding – and the incentive – put such a better vision of the future into place.

Review essay by Milt Hays, Jr.