However, the homeless are not a main let alone sole reason for any company moves away from downtown. There are other issues that are far bigger — wanting to consolidate office space, wanting more parking, to be closer to the suburban employee base, or even just because it’s what the bigwigs personally want. It does, however, contribute to negative perceptions of downtown and the urban core among some people.
Usually agree with you Bill, and would have agreed with this statement up until maybe two years ago, but I've talked to multiple business owners in the last month alone considering a move from downtown exclusively because of the homeless problem. It has truly gotten that bad.
As a dude on the streets five days a week, homelessness and crime absolutely make Downtown Jacksonville a hostile business environment in 2024. It's not a perception thing when you have to walk young female employees to their car so they're not harassed. Or when you have clients coming from out of town having to witness drug deals from the conference room window. Or when you have to send people in on the weekends multiple times a year to fix windows that have been shattered from bum fights or gunfire. Or when you've got people tweaked out on fentanyl screaming that their going to stab you or shitting on the sidewalk. I tried to come in on the weekend a couple of weeks back to get some work done and couldn't even get into the office because the homeless had set up a massive camp literally in the front awning of our building.
Because of how thin the office population has become, and because of how strangely absentee the police presence seems to be in the CBD unless you literally call in a drug deal, there's a real sense of lawlessness that everyone left downtown feels.
I think we're doing ourselves a disservice if we don't acknowledge how urgent of a problem it is, as evidenced by the Citizens situation that ActionsNewsJax is now reporting from multiple sources is tied to safety (
https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/local/safety-concerns-jacksonville-driving-out-large-local-business/LJ4OZOSSUBE4RGQY2MRWQUJL4U/).
Just let the Northbank die already. 50 something years trying to revive a portion of a city that simply refuses to live. Time to call a spade a spade.
Hard disagree. Even the Cubs and Sox won a ring once they finally got the right leadership and strategy in place. There is SO MUCH wasted opportunity on Laura Street alone.
Secret sauce ain't hard, everyone else has figured it out:
1. Partner with someone smarter than you on a true master plan for your urban core, focused on creating the type of clustered, complementing uses that Ennis has been advocating for since like 2005
2. Set aside funds to smartly subsidize strategically important urban initiatives and to build up public infrastructure that makes living and working downtown attractive
3. Execute over time
We've never done this. Just thrown hundreds of millions at demolition, petty grudges, and propping up random projects for the donor class.
Northbank is burning in spite of its bones, not because of them.
But the problem is going to continue to exist in perpetuity if we think the solution is to do everything in a vacuum and turn James Weldon Johnson Park into a hedge maze for the junkies to hide in while the clown cars drive into the river and we save Riverfront Plaza for a 100-story skyscraper that is just one supply chain issue away from being built.
It's just so sad to see the last decade wasted, and a realistic, maybe even aggressive, tentpole for urban success for this mayoral term being returning downtown to its 2018 glory.
