There is too much imbalance on emphasizing residential over office. There should be a heavy emphasis on BOTH.
There were historically 50-60,000 daytime workers downtown in its 1990s prime. The bigger buildings can each hold 5,000+ workers if employers had all of their employees come in and vacancy was lower than it is.
Office workers would do A LOT more to support these restaurants, bars etc than 300-500 new residents per year spread across 4 square miles.
But the city never talks about increasing office use downtown, whether by retaining existing employers or even trying to get new employers into downtown. It's a shame because the cycle will just continue. I never see any marketing/PR to work downtown, but there sure is a lot to live downtown.
After Citizens look for possibly one of the major law firms to leave their downtown digs. While Citizens was reportedly due to employee housing locations (70% on the southside) from a source I know within the company who happens to live on the westside, this law firm relocating (if it does) would be due to "issues" with homeless and safety/security for employees downtown. Apparently a big time partner coming in from a different office in the midwest had his rental car keyed up in the building's adjoining garage and saw some stuff in the elevator of that garage that validated countless previous employee noted and recorded concerns.
The city allowing a greater ratio of "crazy"/homeless/dealer-looking-people to "normal" office worker/visitor along Laura St and into Hemming Plaza really stands out as a deterrent to downtown's success.
The parks under construction cannot get open soon enough because they will become some sort of draw and I would hope would become an attractive amenity for office users.
I was also told that Citizen's move had more to do with proximity to senior leadership housing, more so than vagrant activity.
Regarding office space - Downtown Vision's annual report has office space at roughly 30% vacant. But that doesn't include owner occupied buildings (ie, CSX, etc) because they're unavailable to lease. If you include those, the percentage goes down substantially, I believe.
The Downtown Vision report misrepresents CBRE numbers and has a lot of holes in many of its facts and figures. I am a fan of the report overall and everything Downtown Vision does, but truth is the truth.
The fact is that DT Jax is one of the worst DT office markets in the country, easily in the bottom 3 of top 50 markets or so. It's got one of the highest vacancies, one of the lowest RTOs, and just about the lowest rental rates in the US of all major and mid-size markets to validate just how bad it is. I work in one of the tallest of the towers and most of the time I am in the elevator by myself.
The top floors of the two tallest towers are barely commanding above $25 gross when they come available (definitely not even keeping up with inflation). No new marketed office towers have been built in literally decades, and the one that is under construction is only 5 floors of office with a little over 100K rentable SF. It's a dire situation on the office side to say the least.
Just taking downtown Tampa as a comparison - its sidewalks feel like NYC compared to DT Jax's and it's not a large downtown relatively speaking. Its buildings are full and there is more of a downtown energy there. My company's equivalent office building there has a real hustle and bustle vibe going on. DT Jax has a really sleepy office environment with a lunch time hour that is more of a whisper than a rush.
If we had all of our buildings full and people having returned to the office, our situation down on the streets and fueling downtown businesses would be considerably different.
Instead of working to promote that situation, it seems the city's energy is entirely spent on increasing residents (over 4 square miles) and on promoting programmatic activities. All of the above is necessary - but I wish the office part was not neglected. It would certainly help all of these businesses! I wish the city would do something big to lure another Fidelity to our downtown area. Dun & Bradstreet should have been a downtown deal with the incentives. Paysafe. ICE. The list goes on... We need to do more to bring employers to downtown; we cannot just rely on the trickle of new residential activity spread across a large area.
And to do something to attract DT employers, we need to do more to clean up the streets and we probably need to consider tying incentives to downtown choices. There's nothing we can do about executives wanting to live at the beach.
