Quick response to David Bauerlein's piece here:
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/local/2023/10/27/downtown-jacksonville-has-more-residents-coming/71315929007/More specifically, a quick response to a few key quotes from the DVI.
"The residential community is booming," Downtown Vision CEO Jake Gordon said.
Per the DVI's own report, the ENTIRETY of the "downtown" area that the DVI considers to be downtown (CBD, Lavilla, Sports District, Brooklyn, Southbank) added a grand total of
24 residential units in 2023. In terms of the entire Northbank (including the CBD and LaVilla), fewer than 170 units have been added over the last four years (2020-2023). In what universe does this constitute a "boom" in the residential community?
The post-pandemic office market has emptied out space
Back in 2019, the downtown office market flipped the script when it had a lower vacancy rate than the suburbs. That year, the vacancy rate was 14.6% in downtown compared to 17.5% in the suburbs. It didn't last.
The office vacancy rate in downtown has climbed to 25.8% this year. It's 19.6% in the suburbs.
"The world has changed irrevocably, in my opinion, and people want to work from home," Gordon said.
Again, I hate to toss out a term like "gaslighting" casually, but in this case, one of two things has to be true:
1) The DVI is intentionally bending the truth.
2) The DVI is ignorant to reality.
Not sure which is worse.
I'm a data guy, and here are the hard numbers when comparing Jacksonville downtown office occupancy to the other major metros in the state. Notice how the bounce back has been starkly different for one particular metro.

It's not a cultural problem related to WFH/vacancy trends coming out of the pandemic.
It's a Jacksonville-specific problem.
If we break down pre-pandemic/post-pandemic changes in office vacancy rates for 2023 vs. 2020 in major Florida metros, it's pretty clear that we've got one outlier shitting the bed.

Last thing I'll mention is the $8 billion "pipeline," and why no sane person should take these numbers seriously.
Let's take a quick look at the DVI's pipeline vs. projects that actual cross the finish line, dating back to say, 2016. For what it's worth, this year's anemic "spike" in completed projects is almost exclusively the result of private developments like the Jags sports performance center, Wolfson's Critical Care Tower, and new headquarters for FIS and JEA.

If we look at the average pipeline over the last 8 years vs. the average annual completed projects, we see that, for the last EIGHT YEARS, we've had an average pipeline of $5 billion. Over that same period, we've had average annual completed of $300 million.

Long way of saying that, historically,
only 5.8% of our fluff pipeline has turned into completed development. Not trying to be negative, but I just don't know don't know how we sanely solve the problem if we're living in this fantasy land where things have never been better.