What a kick in the nuts to wake up to.
I find this to be a pretty interesting statement:
“We look forward to building a hub in Atlanta, where talent, diversity, technology and innovation are thriving,”
Evidently, they don't think talent, diversity, technology and innovation are thriving enough locally. What can Jax do to improve in these areas?
Like CityLife said, if Atlanta is the standard for talent, diversity, technology, and innovation, odds are we're dead in the water. Mercedes chose them for a reason. Our post-Consolidation behavior screwed us out of the top tier in our own state, much less other states.
However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do things now to improve. We're finally getting to work on properly funding our school district, getting a good K-12 program is probably important if we want good college programs. We've got what, 3 universities formally here? Plus UF an hour and a half away. I think a lot about how FAMU's law school ended up in Orlando vs anywhere in the northern half of the state.
Honestly, as a UF student I had no idea UF had any true campuses outside of Gainesville. That seemed like a big sticking point about last year's attempt to turn NCF and FL Poly into UF campuses. All that aside, I think it's valuable that the colleges of Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy are apparently all in some form on the Shands campus. There must be some way to better emphasize and grow that experience.
In general, I think UF is close enough that we need to find a way to better connect Gainesville to Jacksonville, to the point that it's easy to jump from one to the other and it's considered less of a "distant place." I don't know if Tallahassee investing in a direct rail line or a new highway or something is the way to do that, but a way should be searched for. In the very long run (I'm talking decades here) I like to imagine that the region between Duval and Alachua County growing together is a realistic possibility if we put some effort into it.
When it comes to UNF, the question I think about a lot is: what are they good at? Like, what would make someone say "I want to go to UNF vs any other school in the state for
this." Finding an identity that makes them unique and really good at something in particular could be helpful, because I don't know if I see them chasing down any of the big schools in terms of size.
I think Jacksonville is already to some degree a diverse city, we've just done an absolutely terrible job at highlighting and improving on that. The main areas we're pouring serious money into within the county's borders are largely the same mostly white suburban sprawl as in St. Johns County to the southeast and Clay County to the southwest. Meanwhile Atlanta has been highlighting and
investing into areas like
Auburn Avenue. We have a long way to go with even simple stuff like making sure communities of color have things like sewer lines or sidewalks.
Technology and innovation are very nebulous terms in this context. Like sure, we can do flashy techy stuff like the Bay Street Innovation Corridor and U2C, but how much is that actually providing a draw for people and companies to come and live here? Or is it about getting tech companies to relocate here? Austin is really sucking the air out of the room on that (we'll see if last week changes that at all). We do have Made in Space, I don't know if that counts for anything. But in general there's going to be a lot of work to do on that kind of front.
