Fledgling developer Mike Langton has plans to convert the 1920s-vintage Greenleaf Annex building on West Adams Street into shops and a dozen loft apartments. -- Crista Jeremiason/Staff

Will anybody be home?
  City's core seeks answers

By Steve Patterson
Times-Union staff writer

For years, housing developments for downtown Jacksonville moved across planners' maps like sea serpents on an ancient globe. Nobody had seen one, and some never expected to, but people guessed what they'd look like and penned them on plan after plan.

Now hundreds of homes are being built on inner-city parcels where they once seemed as unlikely as the Loch Ness monster.

And the big question is whether people will want to live there.

"A lot of people have said to me that we're crazy. . . . We're pretty convinced that they're wrong," said Steven Kruer, a 45-year-old East Arlington paralegal who put a deposit on a $129,500 town house at the Parks at the Cathedral, near St. John's Cathedral, before the first shovel of dirt was turned. He's hoping his home will be ready by winter, several months after his 10-year-old son enters the new middle school being built in nearby LaVilla.

The number of others ready to move downtown will decide, more than anything else, whether the rebirth City Hall has sought for 20 years will develop a momentum that can bring life downtown after the business day ends.

Home-hunters will have plenty of choices.

Seven blocks from Kruer's intended home, an Atlanta developer is building a 22-story complex of luxury apartments, shops and riverfront town houses priced at $495,000.

Elsewhere, foundations are being set for apartments in Five Points, a few period-look houses are being built new in Springfield and a self-described wannabe developer is planning his first foray into downtown lofts at a 1920s-vintage Northbank building.

Since January, construction has started on nearly 500 homes within 2 miles of City Hall, pushed along by both local redevelopment incentives and a national resurgence in downtown growth.

Housing developers have committed to invest about $70 million so far, with promises of more if their first efforts succeed. Saying it must prime the pump to get building started, City Hall has approved about $14 million worth of incentives, tax breaks and infrastructure work at four core-city housing developments.

The people behind each project have different ideas of their market, of the income brackets and demographics of the people they expect to entice.

But even the strongest downtown supporters agree everyone's predictions are really guesswork, for now.

"It's a scenario driven by a complete lack of product," said Paul Krutko, Jacksonville's director of downtown development. "It's real difficult for people to visualize."

With the exception of seniors' housing and buildings for government-subsidized renters, it has been more than 50 years since new housing was constructed in downtown's core.

What backers are betting is that Jacksonville will react like other suburbanized second-tier cities where builders are finding unmet demand for housing in the city's center.

From Columbus, Ohio, to Austin, Texas, cities are predicting 50 percent growth in downtown residential construction in the next 10 years.

In city after city, planners are betting on those homes supplying the human grist for a mill of restaurants, shops and public places that create an economically viable "24-hour downtown," active even after downtown workers go home for the night. That also would boost values of land downtown, typically home to some of the most expensive real estate in any town.

Turning it around

"Downtowns are back," said design guru Andres Duany, who pioneered the trendy neo-traditional development style used from downtown Portland, Ore., to Disney's new town of Celebration in Central Florida. These days, his South Florida-based company finds a stream of cities trying to hire it to plan redevelopment projects.

In Jacksonville, even some people who figured downtown was history have had second thoughts.

"I probably have been the biggest critic of downtown development. . . . I called it Torn-Down Town," said Bill Lee, 55, a carpet store owner who lives in a Murray Hill bungalow his family built 74 years ago.

"But I do believe you can get people downtown on the weekends and in the evening. I want to be one of them."

Lee said he enjoys places like the Florida Theatre and The Jacksonville Landing enough that he wants to live downtown in the same development as Kruer. Working six days a week, he said he's ready for a home that demands less upkeep and yardwork.

If Jacksonville follows national patterns, between 1,000 and 2,000 new houses and apartments could be built downtown by 2010, a study for the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission concluded last year. The raw numbers are tiny stacked against Northeast Florida's 1.1 million people, but they're comparable to many metro areas, where downtowns often house less than 1 percent of the population.

Besides the conversion of the Greenleaf Annex, Mike Langton has ideas for converting 10 other downtown buildings.

To be sure, people have always lived downtown, and still do. But their numbers have dwindled: The 9,300 there in 1990 is closer to 8,300 today, and that includes people in surrounding neighborhoods of East Jacksonville and slivers of San Marco and Riverside.

As important, the longtime residents include occupants of cheap rooming homes, senior citizen apartments and aging low-rent houses that city officials say candidly that they don't expect to drive a renewal of the city's core.

Two thousand new homes would boost residency by close to 50 percent, and Krutko said the demand might even be higher than that.

Shaping expectations

But the response to homes being built now will shape expectations more than any study.

"The proof is in the project, I guess," Krutko said. "If Cathedral sells out very quickly, with the prices they have, that's going to induce other developers to say, 'This is a good opportunity for me.' "

The Parks at the Cathedral, a new incarnation of a town-house plan launched in the 1980s, is City Hall's test case for selling middle-income homeowners on downtown.

Prospective buyers quickly reserved about half of the 63 units by paying $500 down payments.

The $129,500 starter price buys two bedrooms and a den, with property tax rebates and other city-backed incentives that would let some people pay monthly mortgage and tax bills of less than $750. Bigger units carry prices up to $163,000, and absentee and upper-income buyers wouldn't qualify for some incentives.

"The bigger ones went right away," said Myrtice Craig, a real estate agent handling pre-sales of the homes for the developer, Bank of America's community development arm. A longtime agent in Riverside and Avondale, Craig argues that a combination of suburban disenchantment and increasing prosperity in historic neighborhoods abutting downtown has helped the downtown housing market develop.

"I just think we're on the cusp of something great, just like every other downtown in America," she said.

The upper end of the downtown market is Berkman Plaza, where rents in the first 206-unit apartment tower are expected to run from about $850 to $2,000 monthly. Also scheduled are 26 town houses priced at nearly $500,000.

Fourteen town homes have been reserved already, as well as three penthouses and a few other units in the high-rise.

Developer David Berkman, owner of the Jacksonville Lizard Kings hockey team, plans another apartment tower if there's sufficient demand.

Near Five Points, a Texas development company is building the Villas at St. Johns, a 257-unit apartment complex where rents will run $840 to $1,425.

The smallest project ongoing is an effort led by former state Rep. Mike Langton, a novice developer, to convert the 1920s-vintage Greenleaf Annex building on West Adams Street into shops and a dozen loft apartments. Monthly rents there would run about $750.

There's room for more.

Langton has ideas for converting 10 buildings downtown, if the residential market develops.

Bank of America has scenarios for building as many as 500 homes.

In March, the company began building a few houses on Fourth Street in Springfield modeled after the century-old neighborhood's historic homes. Eventually, it plans to build 50 homes that will fill in gaps on blocks where original structures were bulldozed.

"If I can build south from Springfield and north from Cathedral, pretty soon we'll have a doggone nice area," said Mary E. Sorge, the senior vice president running the company's Jacksonville office.