The city is so stupid! Reading people's comments and both the Daily Record and JBJ articles makes me a bit upset. In the JBJ articles DIA board member David Ward is quoted as being very upset that Jacobs/Hyatt would continue to submit unsolicited bids and to make such bids known via a small media blitz. Joe Ayers of CBRE who helped run the latest RFP concludes that in his expertise as a multifamily broker, multifamily is still the current highest and best use. Well, quite frankly, for a host of reasons one could say that for just about any site in any city. At some point the city needs to quit pretending it's desperate for this bullshit 10,000 unit mark downtown in order to start being "self-sufficient" and it needs to designate spaces for certain civic uses.
Ok, so Jacksonville is reportedly not ready for such a convention center "now", but as we grow and approach 2 million people with ever increasing tourism coming our way, at some point sooner rather than later we probably will be ready for such a convention center. Where are we going to put it? Of course we can only think about one thing at a time here and right now that seems to be hitting the magical 10,000 unit mark, and we are doing all we can to hit it - including expanding the geographic definition of downtown and bulldozing over previous agreements with existing non-residential users in the city (not to mention bulldozing over other historic buildings not likely to become apartments) to do so.
I question the relative genius of some of the board members and some of the DIA staff. If this is all about appeasing Lenny Curry and Shad Khan, I do hope some back door discussions are being had so that such a valid convention center proposal for this site sticks around for the next administration.