J Magazine June 2017

at a bar next door that spilled out onto the
street. So there are great places, but that
concentration, that corridor is not there.
The Downtown Investment Authority,
the mayor, City Council, real estate brokers
and property owners all really need to sit
down with everybody at the table and start
a highly specific, strategic effort to create
two great corridors. Let’s understand exactly
how much street-level retail exists, what
it will cost to make these spaces habitable,
where are the gaps in walkability and then
make a concerted effort to make Adams
and Laura Streets truly vibrant places, and
go from there.
Does Brooklyn feel like Downtown to
you?
Brooklyn has been its own neighborhood
for nearly 150 years. We have to
respect that history and appreciate that
context. That said, I think Brooklyn is going
to be the next great Southeastern urban
neighborhood. There are two developers
that have assembled some land along Park
and Forrest that are going to really accelerate
Brooklyn’s growth.
The city has hired a consultant to look
at redesigning Park Street to make it more
people-friendly, because it’s junk right now.
If that gets completed, Park Street could
be every bit as fantastic as Gaines Street in
Tallahassee.
The booming health of Midtown in
Atlanta, The Gulch in Nashville and Uptown
in Charlotte are all crucial to the success
of their respective CBD’s, and our own
Brooklyn has a chance to be better than all
of those.
If you were mayor what would you do?
There is a block of vacant land that the
state attorney uses as a parking lot now
along Adams Street, which used to be the
George Washington Hotel. Give it away, immediately.
You could build a parking garage
on that site and wrap apartments around it.
By giving the land away, the city is
essentially acting as an equity partner that
a private developer can use to finance
market-rate residential. Same thing with
the land the city owns on Main Street that
is used for a sculpture park. That could
be used for a two-to-three-story block of
row homes. Give those away to encourage
market rate rentals, and you’ll have maybe
110-150 units pop up within a three-block
radius along Adams Street. Again, it’s all
about clustering complementary uses in a
compact setting.
It’s like a good home inspector, only for
a business.
Exactly. As a business owner, you make
really good sandwiches, but you don’t know
anything about electrical work. You don’t
know how to build a trench for your grease
trap. You know how to run a business and
provide good customer service.
Another aspect of that program is that
they act as a liaison for small business
owners as they go through a clearly defined
path in order to open their doors. Here in
Jax, if you have the cash to hire a land use
attorney, great, they can do it all for you. But
there’s nothing on the city’s website that
helps you walk through the process.
Let’s say you’re a marketing firm and
try to open in a place that used to be an
accountant’s office, then a year later you
get someone from the planning department
asking where is your certificate of
use? Then, the fire marshal shows up a few
months later and starts asking you about
the sprinkler system or fire alarm system.
All you know is that you went to the Tax
Collector’s office, got your business license,
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©2017 Suddath Van Lines, Inc. U.S. DOT No. 29609 Fla. IM No. 1411, Sentry Household Shipping, Inc. U.S. DOT No. 2465888 NVOCC 7434N FF 001124,
Suddath Global Logistics, LLC U.S. DOT No. 2212216 NVOCC 2894NF, Centra Worldwide, Inc. IAC WP94-01116, IATA No. 0119853, Air Land Forwarders, Inc. FF 000548