(12-23-2020, 01:52 PM)copycat Wrote:

(12-23-2020, 01:28 PM)StroudCrowd1 Wrote: On a side note, kill 2 birds with one stone and go ahead a build a new appropriate sized stadium in a good part of town that developers will embrace. The downtown experiment in Jacksonville will never work.

I disagree.  From the shipyards to the Landing property from the river to Bay Street has huge potential.  Run a boardwalk from one end to the other and you have a great venue for bars, restaurants and little shops much like Savanna but modern and with smooth walkways.  Down the road run the skyway from the beaches and Mandarin and you have a revitalized downtown.

It would be nice to build a boardwalk from the Hyatt Regency over to the stadium / metro park, but
How would the boardwalk cross the shipyard docks? At the roots, ignoring the docks (not as pretty), or at the tips, with new bridges (more expensive)?
How are you going to work around/through all the contaminated soil in that area?
Smarter and wealthier people than us, including Shad Khan, have thought of these these things before, and concluded they were too expensive to be worth doing.
That means there actually *isn't* potential.

As for the skyway, it could certainly run south and east, but there would be no point in elevating it out in the burbs, it wouldn't be a skyway anymore.  It would be commuter rail.  Which is good.  But what commuter rail actually does, if you look at Miami and Orlando, is create a little string of high rise apartments near each stop, and soon those develop small nightlife districts.  Usually the train doesn't even run at night. It doesn't tend to create downtown nightlife. What can create downtown nightlife is consistent police presence, liberal liquor licenses, quick turnaround on DOH permits, constant attention to keeping sidewalks and streets smooth, and most importantly, GOOD HOUSING AND FANCY HOTELS IN WALKING DISTANCE. Not projects. Old single family homes mixed with new highrises. A few of the folks you see out at night in Miami came by public transit. More drove in from the suburbs. But most live there, or are staying in a nearby hotel.

The area around the stadium is contaminated and industrial. It will never have these things. There are only a handful of locations in Jacksonville that have this kind of potential. San Marco and lavilla are the only two that are anywhere close to the downtown business district.

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