Author Topic: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside  (Read 23760 times)

thelakelander

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It has been seven years since two Jacksonville restaurateurs proposed opening The Roost bar and restaurant on Oak Street in Riverside and experienced a backlash from area residents.

It now looks like the restaurant and bar, this time as The Local, is moving closer to opening at the site, though opposition remains.

https://www.jaxdailyrecord.com/news/2023/aug/03/the-local-restaurant-and-bar-wants-to-open-on-oak-street-in-riverside/
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Jax_Developer

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #1 on: August 03, 2023, 12:05:13 PM »
Lol folks shouldn't have moved to Riverside if they wanted no traffic. Like others have said, I feel like JAX actually has quite the NIMBY crowd in RAP particularly.

jcjohnpaint

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #2 on: August 03, 2023, 12:40:46 PM »
Like the people who move to St. John’s count saying, never thought so many people would move here! It used to be so nice.

simms3

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #3 on: August 03, 2023, 12:41:52 PM »
RAP and the mind virus it spreads is a disaster.  I toured (2 days ago) a Jax native who works for a developer in Atlanta and lives there now who's looking for land in northeast FL who said a few poignant things (we both were at the Bisnow event where Aundra Wallace was one of the panelists).

1. He says, "We need to start building up, not out."  Well how the hell can we do that when the worst NIMBYism is in our urban core?  It is a real problem that needs to be tackled and the way to do it is to find a fight that will bring down these "preservation" district groups to size.  Driving through Murray Hill now I see the "Murray Hill Preservation Association" membership sticker on more and more houses.  Every house that has one of those, or RAP's, or SMPS's, or SPAR's is a house declaring "I have the mind virus" and am a NIMBY.

2. He put into words something I've been searching just how to describe.  The Jax economy is basically a money circulator.  There is no real substantial outside money coming in - it's small businesses feeding other small businesses (Lawn Service owner making decent middle class living and then paying other service providers and there's a huge abundance of this).

Aundra (and recent articles discussing JaxUSA thoughts) are saying how office and industrial percentages recently flipped, thanks to port.  How about this for a thought - while other SE cities have attracted BIG outside money and firms relocating from CA/NY en masse, Jax, while benefiting from overall population growth, has not.  We are getting lower wage industrial jobs en masse and no doubt the port helps, but WHY aren't we getting the office jobs?
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simms3

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #4 on: August 03, 2023, 12:49:24 PM »
Ok I looked at the picture of the crowd in the article and it's tons of YOUNG people.  I sure as s**t hope that they were there to voice support, not opposition.

There really is a mind virus in NE FL affecting creation of solid real estate here.

The article today about PV Inn & Club's and the Lodge's expansions and renovations had a whole section devoted to height limits and opposition surrounding that.  We are talking about clubs wanting to stay 3 stories but have parapets and architectural elements and higher ceiling heights.  It's outrageously insane.

ANOTHER article from today talks about a new bill going before St. Augustine commission to limit alcohol sales with special new permit for after midnight (so from 12 to 2).  They featured video of a woman up there talking about the same thing and wanting to keep St. Augustine "quaint".


I have been harping on this my whole damn life but northeast FL is a place requiring a special amount of patience with the people here.  It's outrageous level of NIMBYism that goes WAY above and beyond most places, and the general population is drinking some weird water.  People here DO NOT WANT ANY CHANGE.  They like it the way it is.

It's very unfortunate in my opinion, but we need to really start fighting back.
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Jax_Developer

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #5 on: August 03, 2023, 02:37:32 PM »
The 35' height limit at the beach is one of the saddest pieces of legislation that exists, as far as development goes, locally. The second being our "nice" urban neighborhoods all being NIMBY. Riverside, Avondale, San Marco.. areas that actually can support dense construction hate the idea of traffic and congestion lol...

It really is a great catch 22 locally. We reject the areas of town that can easily support new development, and we flood money into parts of town that are "going to happen" to then get rejected by those living in neighborhoods, with actual wealth bases, in the same neighborhoods they NIMBY.

thelakelander

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #6 on: August 03, 2023, 03:40:56 PM »
The NIMBY thing is funny. Right down the street in LaVilla, people are fighting because they want back the density that was intentionally taken away from them. Yet, in previous years, decision makers have bent over backwards to accommodate politically connected entities with a largely autocentric and suburban mindset.
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marcuscnelson

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #7 on: August 03, 2023, 04:11:59 PM »
I don't understand how they're claiming that this area is just a quaint little neighborhood being somehow besieged by this one restaurant.

There's a massive Ascension hospital like a block to the west, and Publix along with apartments and other restaurants a block to the east.

What the hell does this even mean?

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“So many people want to see this great neighborhood, want to come in and get a piece of it. Part of the trouble is … they want to milk every nickel out of every dollar out of every square foot they can,” Wood said.

Why is it this one guy's right to decide whether a business is going to be too successful and "draw too many people"?

Look, if FDOT can get a ton of valid concerns about massive highway expansion and go ahead anyway to the tune of billions, the city can look at these nonsensical ramblings about a local business and make the right choice.
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iMarvin

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #8 on: August 03, 2023, 04:53:15 PM »
I wonder if those people so concerned about traffic would support light rail down Park Street or Riverside Ave. Oh wait, that's not allowed either in their quaint neighborhood 2 miles away from downtown...

I can only imagine the outrage if they were proposing an apartment building there. Community meetings for such small developments seem unnecessary.

Tacachale

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #9 on: August 03, 2023, 05:06:51 PM »
NIMBYism is definitely a problem, especially in cases like this restaurant. Fighting it is silly. But NIMBYism isn't especially bad in Jacksonville compared to elsewhere, nor is it a major issue outside a few so-called "desirable" neighborhoods. Hell, even in so-called "nice" urban core neighborhoods, it really only applies to Riverside-Avondale and to some extent Springfield. There are NIMBYs in San Marco, but there are also several infill apartment buildings recently built or under construction and many people happy with that. I am one of them, and lo and behold, I have an SMPS sign on my house. There's also infill happening across Springfield, Murray Hill and other neighborhoods.

As Ennis says, many Urban Core neighborhoods are actively pushing for new development, as by far the biggest cause of declining housing stock has *not* been preservation, it's been the demolition of houses. In fact, preservation could help that by preventing more homes, especially missing-middle housing, from being demolished for empty lots. I wrote an article a while about on this very topic: https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/the-yimby-case-for-historic-preservation/

Oh, and Jacksonville is doing just fine with corporate relocations, not that office jobs are any better than any other jobs. Not sure where that critique is coming from: https://jaxusa.org/news/florida-jacksonville-see-most-corporate-relocation-growth-of-states-large-u-s-cities-respectively/
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Jax_Developer

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #10 on: August 03, 2023, 05:31:19 PM »
I would generally agree that NIMBY’s are less present in Jax generally. It feels hyper concentrated in a few desirable markets. Beaches especially.

simms3

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #11 on: August 03, 2023, 05:48:59 PM »
NIMBYism is definitely a problem, especially in cases like this restaurant. Fighting it is silly.

Hell yea you can fight it and it's worth it!  I got in on the ground floor action in San Francisco, where YIMBY Action was created as an actual political party.  The article below correctly quotes Laura Clarke as the founder, however, a woman (who I got to know personally) named Sonja Trauss really did the most (in my opinion) to rally troops together to coalesce against NIMBYism.  I've seen the fight firsthand, and I've seen it succeed.  Sonja came from outside of the developer world and never thought in a thousand years this would be her purpose.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/yimby-groups-pro-development/532437/

Quote
Sonja Trauss, who founded the Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF) in 2013, told me that her group’s most well attended meeting occurred right after the election. “Man, did we have a surge in interest for getting involved in politics after the election,” she said. Generally, she says she’s seeing more groups like hers in the Bay Area, and now some elected officials will disparage NIMBYism in a way they didn’t before. “It seems like the tide has turned,” she said. Laura Foote Clark formally started the group YIMBY Action six months before the November elections. Membership in the Bay Area group has doubled since the election, she told me. “We definitely got the initial Trump bump—people being like, ‘Oh my God, the world is ending, we have to do something,’” she told me.

Few places have seen more of a surge in pro-building sentiment than the Bay Area, where development has traditionally been hampered by objections from neighbors concerned with the downsides of density. Silicon Valley added about 344,000 residents between 2007 and 2016, according to Stephen Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, but only 69,503 units were issued building permits in that time. (Levy calculates that 130,094 units of new housing would have been needed to keep pace with population growth.)

Some people in the Bay Area are changing their minds about developers, Clark, of YIMBY Action, told me. More and more of them are affected by rising housing prices, and so are becoming aware of the problem of a lack of inventory. Others are increasingly realizing their children won’t be able to afford to live close by. “It is no longer just low-income folks who are housing-burdened—it’s now moved well up the ladder,” Levy said.

With a growing Bay Area pro-housing lobby have come victories for the movement. In May, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law called Home SF, which allows developers to build taller buildings and more units if they include affordable units in the project. (A prior version of the same housing law had died last year after an anti-development protest at which one housing activist decried the proposal as “ethnic cleansing.”)...




But NIMBYism isn't especially bad in Jacksonville compared to elsewhere, nor is it a major issue outside a few so-called "desirable" neighborhoods.

My point of reference is this: In my prior career, I did development deals in Boston, Atlanta, Nashville, Denver, up and down CA, and elsewhere and worked for firms doing deals in many places.  Not only was I focused on my own deals, my firms had many meetings, weekly even, to discuss the wider deal pipeline and issues surrounding specific deals.

I have had A LOT of exposure around the country (not the least of which was living in multiple cities).

I have not personally witnessed or been affected by as much NIMBYism just about anywhere else as I have in this city and metro region.  It is off the charts here and I sell land, so I work even now with lots of developers from elsewhere, and they also attest to unique levels of difficulty here.  I will go out on a limb here and say you are just wrong.  Jax is about as NIMBY as it gets, which is reflected ALL OVER town in various ways.  The suburbs have also clammed up big time.  They go through spurts, but St. Johns County is going to dry up quite a bit, relatively speaking, as political pressure has mounted in an unbelievable way down there.  So it's not even just Riverside-Avondale, it really is practically everywhere now.


I am one of them, and lo and behold, I have an SMPS sign on my house.

Well and from your perspective there's not much of an added amount of NIMBYism in Jax, it's not that much of a problem.  Nothing personal against you at all, but you're sort of proving my point.  I think you've drunk a lot of the Koolaid of these groups and you probably think I greatly exaggerate the problem here and so we'll probably not see eye to eye on this one.


As Ennis says, many Urban Core neighborhoods are actively pushing for new development, as by far the biggest cause of declining housing stock has *not* been preservation, it's been the demolition of houses. In fact, preservation could help that by preventing more homes, especially missing-middle housing, from being demolished for empty lots. I wrote an article a while about on this very topic: https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/the-yimby-case-for-historic-preservation/

Wait, we've had a decline in housing stock in Jax?  There's a rampant problem of demolition?  Where are you talking about?  Also, I'm FOR preservation, certainly, but at this point more focused on downtown commercial (or our truly great structures like the recently demolished Ford Assemble Plant) than average 1930s vinyl siding homes in Avondale that are in total disrepair and also a dime a dozen.

Oh, and Jacksonville is doing just fine with corporate relocations, not that office jobs are any better than any other jobs. Not sure where that critique is coming from: https://jaxusa.org/news/florida-jacksonville-see-most-corporate-relocation-growth-of-states-large-u-s-cities-respectively/

My veiled point earlier was that JaxUSA doesn't seem to be doing as good of a job, but they have great talking points!  Maybe it's just because I know of what's happening in Raleigh, Salt Lake City, Nashville, Austin and the other cities in our own state, but we are not on the level.

JaxUSA also doubtfully played an important role in the only "big" news story office relos we had (Dunn & Bradstreet and Paysafe, both already firmly in the FIS ecosystem).

Look, I know office as a real estate category is really down right now.  But there are other cities, even lesser than the ones I just mentioned above, that are still getting nice new office developments to accommodate growth in their various sectors (the upper margins undoubtedly) and corporate relocations.  We are not getting crap compared to too many other cities we should be able to be comparing against.  I think there are plenty of people who would back me up on this.  All it takes is a quick weekend trip to some of these places to see the level of construction there to realize the quality of economic growth they are getting versus what we are getting.
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Josh

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #12 on: August 04, 2023, 11:30:00 AM »
There was a lot of bad blood from the initial 'The Roost' proposal which was rumored to be due to fact that apparently someone representing the property went around knocking on doors in the neighborhood telling people they were planning on opening a small restaurant in the building space, which was drastically different than what the actual plan was (drastically lower seat count, no amplified music, etc) for the space. Some people apparently took this as the owners proactively trying to get people to not pay too much attention to the details presented for rezoning. If that was the case, then I imagine those same people in the opposition are still bitter.

simms3

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #13 on: August 04, 2023, 12:04:09 PM »
With 5 Points 2-3 blocks east and King St 3 blocks west, at some point this area should be seen in the wider context of the city as a sort of "vibrancy hub", not as a quiet crabby patty neighborhood for old people.  We need vibrant neighborhoods to attract young professional types and companies that employ them.

Oak St has A LOT of commercial on it on this stretch, and many if not mostly young renters (I know of a few myself).  I know there are houses that back up to it, but there too you're talking Riverside Ave, one of the busiest streets in this part of town (so I don't think people moved to Riverside Ave demanding peace and quiet as if on a back street dead end cul-de-sac).

This much ruckus over a business like this, *in this location*, is exactly the kind of non-sense that continuously holds Jacksonville back.
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Tacachale

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Re: The Local restaurant and bar wants to open on Oak Street in Riverside
« Reply #14 on: August 04, 2023, 12:07:21 PM »
NIMBYism is definitely a problem, especially in cases like this restaurant. Fighting it is silly.

Hell yea you can fight it and it's worth it!  I got in on the ground floor action in San Francisco, where YIMBY Action was created as an actual political party.  The article below correctly quotes Laura Clarke as the founder, however, a woman (who I got to know personally) named Sonja Trauss really did the most (in my opinion) to rally troops together to coalesce against NIMBYism.  I've seen the fight firsthand, and I've seen it succeed.  Sonja came from outside of the developer world and never thought in a thousand years this would be her purpose.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/yimby-groups-pro-development/532437/

Quote
Sonja Trauss, who founded the Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF) in 2013, told me that her group’s most well attended meeting occurred right after the election. “Man, did we have a surge in interest for getting involved in politics after the election,” she said. Generally, she says she’s seeing more groups like hers in the Bay Area, and now some elected officials will disparage NIMBYism in a way they didn’t before. “It seems like the tide has turned,” she said. Laura Foote Clark formally started the group YIMBY Action six months before the November elections. Membership in the Bay Area group has doubled since the election, she told me. “We definitely got the initial Trump bump—people being like, ‘Oh my God, the world is ending, we have to do something,’” she told me.

Few places have seen more of a surge in pro-building sentiment than the Bay Area, where development has traditionally been hampered by objections from neighbors concerned with the downsides of density. Silicon Valley added about 344,000 residents between 2007 and 2016, according to Stephen Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, but only 69,503 units were issued building permits in that time. (Levy calculates that 130,094 units of new housing would have been needed to keep pace with population growth.)

Some people in the Bay Area are changing their minds about developers, Clark, of YIMBY Action, told me. More and more of them are affected by rising housing prices, and so are becoming aware of the problem of a lack of inventory. Others are increasingly realizing their children won’t be able to afford to live close by. “It is no longer just low-income folks who are housing-burdened—it’s now moved well up the ladder,” Levy said.

With a growing Bay Area pro-housing lobby have come victories for the movement. In May, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law called Home SF, which allows developers to build taller buildings and more units if they include affordable units in the project. (A prior version of the same housing law had died last year after an anti-development protest at which one housing activist decried the proposal as “ethnic cleansing.”)...



I meant it's silly for people to fight against the restaurant. It was a fit for the area and IMO the exemptions are reasonable. And I agree that the YIMBYs have done great things in the Bay Area. I mentioned them in the article I linked. They're a huge part of why the legislature and governor passing pro-housing bills with actual teeth.


But NIMBYism isn't especially bad in Jacksonville compared to elsewhere, nor is it a major issue outside a few so-called "desirable" neighborhoods.

My point of reference is this: In my prior career, I did development deals in Boston, Atlanta, Nashville, Denver, up and down CA, and elsewhere and worked for firms doing deals in many places.  Not only was I focused on my own deals, my firms had many meetings, weekly even, to discuss the wider deal pipeline and issues surrounding specific deals.

I have had A LOT of exposure around the country (not the least of which was living in multiple cities).

I have not personally witnessed or been affected by as much NIMBYism just about anywhere else as I have in this city and metro region.  It is off the charts here and I sell land, so I work even now with lots of developers from elsewhere, and they also attest to unique levels of difficulty here.  I will go out on a limb here and say you are just wrong.  Jax is about as NIMBY as it gets, which is reflected ALL OVER town in various ways.  The suburbs have also clammed up big time.  They go through spurts, but St. Johns County is going to dry up quite a bit, relatively speaking, as political pressure has mounted in an unbelievable way down there.  So it's not even just Riverside-Avondale, it really is practically everywhere now.


You lived in California, you've seen NIMBYism at a much stronger level than here. There you've got cases where NIMBYs are empowered to use the local ordinances to fight any new housing, resulting in situations like environmental review law being used to keep housing from replacing a parking lot, a situation where residents of one apartment tower opposed a second apartment because it would block their view of a clock, and even a case where a city council member in Ojai fought new housing so hard that she was priced out of her own town. These aren't just anecdotal examples; it's a structural problem.

NIMBYism is bad in many large cities and small towns in many parts of the country, especially in areas seen as desirable or exclusive. There are NIMBYs in Jacksonville, but we don't have anything to that level. For every St. Johns County resident complaining about all the newcomers, there are 50 newcomers coming anyway. For every Ortega or Riverside, there's not only a San Marco that's actually building apartments, but also a LaVilla, Eastside and Downtown Northbank that are literally begging for new development. Sure, they don't want crap development, but that's not the same issue.

I'd go so far as to say that NIMBYism isn't a big factor in the housing crisis in Jax and much of Florida. It's far more a matter of not building enough housing to meet demand, which is mostly an issue of local zoning restricting what can be built, and long-standing neglect of the affordable housing fund, among other smaller issues.

I am one of them, and lo and behold, I have an SMPS sign on my house.

Well and from your perspective there's not much of an added amount of NIMBYism in Jax, it's not that much of a problem.  Nothing personal against you at all, but you're sort of proving my point.  I think you've drunk a lot of the Koolaid of these groups and you probably think I greatly exaggerate the problem here and so we'll probably not see eye to eye on this one.

Yes, I do think you greatly exaggerate the problem. And yes, I have an SMPS sign on my house and am not a NIMBY.

As Ennis says, many Urban Core neighborhoods are actively pushing for new development, as by far the biggest cause of declining housing stock has *not* been preservation, it's been the demolition of houses. In fact, preservation could help that by preventing more homes, especially missing-middle housing, from being demolished for empty lots. I wrote an article a while about on this very topic: https://www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/the-yimby-case-for-historic-preservation/

Wait, we've had a decline in housing stock in Jax?  There's a rampant problem of demolition?  Where are you talking about?  Also, I'm FOR preservation, certainly, but at this point more focused on downtown commercial (or our truly great structures like the recently demolished Ford Assemble Plant) than average 1930s vinyl siding homes in Avondale that are in total disrepair and also a dime a dozen.

In the Urban Core, we lost 50% of the population from 1950 to 2010 and are only now starting to recover. Much of that has been down to a loss of housing stock from Jim Crow-era infrastructure projects targeting Black neighborhoods, from later urban renewal projects, and from code enforcement condemning houses that could be saved.

Even in desirable older neighborhoods there's a loss of housing stock even if it's harder to see. In my hometown of Neptune Beach, for one example, old missing middle housing is being converted to single-family or outright demolished to make way for a single St. Johns County-style McMansion. Even though new housing has been built, there's no net gain of housing and the population hasn't increased (in fact it's down slightly from 2000). This trend has happened in other neighborhoods at different times.

Oh, and Jacksonville is doing just fine with corporate relocations, not that office jobs are any better than any other jobs. Not sure where that critique is coming from: https://jaxusa.org/news/florida-jacksonville-see-most-corporate-relocation-growth-of-states-large-u-s-cities-respectively/

My veiled point earlier was that JaxUSA doesn't seem to be doing as good of a job, but they have great talking points!  Maybe it's just because I know of what's happening in Raleigh, Salt Lake City, Nashville, Austin and the other cities in our own state, but we are not on the level.

JaxUSA also doubtfully played an important role in the only "big" news story office relos we had (Dunn & Bradstreet and Paysafe, both already firmly in the FIS ecosystem).

Look, I know office as a real estate category is really down right now.  But there are other cities, even lesser than the ones I just mentioned above, that are still getting nice new office developments to accommodate growth in their various sectors (the upper margins undoubtedly) and corporate relocations.  We are not getting crap compared to too many other cities we should be able to be comparing against.  I think there are plenty of people who would back me up on this.  All it takes is a quick weekend trip to some of these places to see the level of construction there to realize the quality of economic growth they are getting versus what we are getting.

My point is that (1) we're doing fine in corporate job growth, and that (2) office jobs aren't the only or the most important jobs.
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