The Great Reset: What Will It Mean for Jacksonville?
A local planner reviews Urban theorist Richard Florida's explanation of why the recession is the mother of invention and ponders what it means for Jacksonville.
For anyone who is thinking seriously about Jacksonville’s future in a post-Great Recession world, discovering Richard Florida’s new book, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, is like finding cool water in the desert or sitting down to a comforting fire at the end of a long winter’s walk. Florida, a well-known professional geographer with several popular works to his credit, has written what may turn out to be one of the most important and influential works of the decade, and it is must reading for anyone who is concerned about influencing the direction that life in this community may take.
Florida’s thesis, briefly summarized, is that we are now in the midst of an epochal social and economic transformation of the same magnitude as the Long Depression of the late 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. In each instance, the trajectory of existing modes of development reached and, inevitably, overshot its sustainable limits, thus occasioning a crisis in terms of finding a new balance – a better “spatial fix,” to use the author’s term – between technology, geography, and powers of human adaptation. “Great Resets,” Florida observes, “are broad and fundamental transformations of the economic and social order, and involve much more than strictly economic or financial events.” In all such cases, he continues,
In the first Great Reset, marked by the end of agriculture and the existing pattern of rural settlement as the dominant modes in our national life, Americans creatively adapted the new technological innovations (railroads, streetcars, elevators, telephones, electricity, etc.) and social infrastructure (factories, public education, and a plethora of new social and political organizations) of the late 19th century to build the great industrial cities of that era. By the late 1920s, however, the Fordist paradigm had begun to falter under the weight of its own internal contradictions and, typically, overshot into another speculative bubble similar to the one that preceded it in 1873. At this point, a new set of social and spatial innovations – think cars, highways, shopping malls, and single-family homes – came together to create the transforming engine of suburbia.
Today – witness the crash of the real estate/speculative finance bubble and the myriad social costs of our expensive fixation with owning and operating our McMansions and SUVs – the paradigm of suburban growth has reached and overshot its functional limits. In the present case, Florida believes that the emerging new spatial fix will involve the flowering of a number of incipient megaregions in which existing, highly flexible and creative cities (or clusters of cities) will become fully integrated with their suburban hinterlands to create a new centers of human productivity*.
“Megaregions,” he continues, “are to our time what suburbanization was to the postwar era. They provide the seeds of a new spatial fix. They expand and intensify our use of land and space the way that the industrial city during the First Reset and suburbia did during the Second.” (p. 144) In Florida’s view, each of these periodic crises and responses represents a “great reset” to new modes of thinking and living, and we had better get about the business of accommodating ourselves to this realty.
*Ironically, we may have come full circle back to the concept of regionalism that was championed by Benton MacKaye at about the time of the last great reset. Indeed, as Florida suggests, our ability to think from a truly regional perspective may be one of the greatest tests of our willingness to change.
Thinking Anew: Applying the Lessons of the Great Reset to Jacksonville
Seen from the perspective of The Great Reset, the problem for Jacksonville – which, curiously, is nowhere mentioned in the book – is threefold. First, like many other Sunbelt cities, our local economy (or, to use the older term, our economic base), not to mention our very perception of reality, became fixated on what Florida calls “the great growth illusion of development for development’s sake.”
(1) Acknowledging the End of Development for Development's Sake
“New housing development,” Florida observes, “brought shopping malls, with chain restaurants, big-box stores, and the like providing at least the semblance of expand-ing jobs and growth. Of course, all these new homes needed furniture, electronics, appliances, granite countertops, window treatments, and more, necessitating even more retail. And the people flocking there needed more and more cars, which meant more car dealerships and ultimately more roads. The syndrome spilled over to the public sector. Cities grew, tax coffers filled, spending increased, and the people just kept coming. Yet the boom neither followed nor resulted in the development of sustainable, scalable, highly productive industries or services. It was fueled and funded by housing, and housing was its primary product. In this debt-intoxicated, crazy real estate bubble era, whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes.” (p. 93, emphasis added)
While Florida does not expressly note the political ramifications of this pattern of development, it is worth observing that here in Jacksonville, the local suburban growth-home building lobby has historically determined who gets selected – and has their campaigns funded – for public office. Likewise, their ability to withhold advertising acts as a powerful check on “allowable discourse” about planning for our future in our local media outlets. Whether or not Jacksonville can reshape its economic base into something that is more sustainable in the long term – and adjust its politics accordingly – is, of course, one of the questions at the heart of the Great Reset.
(2) Identifying and Strengthening Jacksonville’s Regional Context
Our second problem is that while Jacksonville's local economy, like many other Sunbelt cities, has been hobbled and distorted by the suburban “growth illusion” (see Chapter 14 for the details), we – unfortunately – do not fit the emerging spatial pattern of many other southern cities that, according to Florida, seem likely to evolve into tightly integrated megaregions. As he outlines in Chapter 18, The Great Resettle, “The future of urban development belongs to a larger kind of geographic unit that has emerged over the last several decades: the megaregion. People around the globe are crowding into the world’s most promising megaregions – the concentrations of population that encompass several cities and their surrounding suburban rings – that have grown swiftly in recent years.” (p. 142)
Going on to describe such emerging southern megaregions of Char-lanta (Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham), Dal-Austin (Dallas and Austin), Hou-Orleans (Houston and New Orleans), and So-Flo (Miami, Orlando, and Tampa), the author sets out an extensive and amply documented brief that such aggregations of talented people and new technologies will be the primary engines of economic regeneration in a post reset world.
If, as Florida suggests, such multi-nucleated, transit-linked megaregions represent the future, what does this mean for Jacksonville? Lacking the kind of spatial synergy that he sees emerging out of the increasing interconnectedness of the Miami-Orlando-Tampa megaregion, where do we go from here? The obvious approach, applying the same lessons to our single city-centered region, would be to embark on the very same kind of thoughtful integration of our existing urban center(s) with our suburban hinterland.
(3) Resetting Our Local Thinking
If Jacksonville can apply the same lessons of history and geography that have enabled cities like Boston, Pittsburgh, and Charlotte to weather the current economic storm, we may also prosper in the future as they have. In order to do this, however, we must first abandon the “suburban growth illusion” (and its self serving, backward-looking politics) and replace it with a much more functional concept of regional planning. Drawing on the specific insights of The Great Reset, here are several things that we absolutely must do.
Identifying and Creating Our Future Economic Base
As noted earlier, perhaps the most difficult challenge that Jacksonville faces is rebuilding a “real,” sustainable economy to replace the “development for development’s sake” bubble economy of the recent past. As the author indicates in his chapter on the emerging characteristics of the post-reset economy, “We are living through an even more powerful and fundamental economic shift, from an industrial system to an economy that is increasingly powered by knowledge, creativity, and ideas.” (p. 111)
While we have the advantage of an established and growing international port and at least the nucleus of several more traditional industries, what kinds of things – in the author’s words – will Jacksonville be doing in the future to provide needed goods and services to the rest of the world? Similarly, can Jacksonville successfully transition from its traditional low wage, low skill “plantation model” to deliberately creating the kind of creative, flexible “economic ecology” that has powered economic sustainability in other areas? And what, exactly, will it take to do this?
Integrating Jacksonville into a True Regional Community
The second of these necessary transformations, the heart of the current reset process as Florida suggests, is creating the new transportation infrastructure to link Jacksonville’s more densely populated urban centers with its suburban hinterland. As he points out again and again (see Chapter 21 for the specific details), the connectivity of public transit is absolutely vital to restructuring of our post-crash way of life, and we had best get on with the business of doing this as quickly as we can. Building still more roads – and the proposed Outer Beltway boondoggle is the absolute, howling antithesis of everything that Florida is writing about – and pouring yet more public funds into a failed and increasingly dysfunctional paradigm will do nothing to make Jacksonville a better or more economically productive place to live in. Beginning to connect the pieces of our own small region into a more vital and functionally integrated whole will ensure our place in the future, if we have the courage to insist on it. Quoting Florida once again,
The irony – and hopefully not the tragedy – of Jacksonville’s situation is that we already have both the means and most of the necessary funding already largely in place to accomplish this kind of fundamentally necessary transformation. This applies not only to linking together the disconnected pieces of our downtown, but building the light rail lines that will, as Florida proposes, make us more productive and sustainable in the long run. As he restates this part of his thesis, “To ensure a true, lasting recovery, we’ll need to mobilize and guide these shifting forces so that they come together into a workable system. A new spatial fix – a new [transportation-based] geography of working and living – will be our only path back to renewed economic growth, confidence, and prosperity.” (p. 107)
So Why Should Anyone Want to Move to Jacksonville? Rebuilding and Enhancing Our Quality of Life
In the post-reset America that Florida describes, younger workers (whose education, talents, and creativity will help transform their destination’s economy) will naturally gravitate to those functional, spatially integrated regions that offer them the most in terms of providing a dense network of career and social opportunities, but they are vitally concerned with other quality of life issues as well. In describing current research into the location decisions of younger, better educated workers, Florida notes that “In these highly mobile and economically tumultuous times, career success for young people depends on locating themselves in a thick labor market that offers diverse and abundant job opportunities.” At the same time, however, their prospective jobs were not their highest ranked factor.
If these are indeed the attitudes shared by the kinds of younger people who create vibrant, sustainable economies, why, indeed, should people like this want to settle in our smallish, rather isolated region? Worse, on closer inspection, Jacksonville, the incipient regional core, suffers from so many seemingly intractable problems – lingering divisions across race and income lines (the “two cities” problem), a faltering, equally divided public school system that fails to graduate more than a third of its students, a spatially isolated, dysfunctional downtown core, and the “leadership” of an entrenched political machine that despises planning and whose only concern appears to be lining the pockets of the well-connected political camp followers that congregate around City Hall – that it is sometimes hard to imagine how things might ever be changed.
Perhaps the most hopeful news for Jacksonville, as Florida suggests, is that the road to building stimulating and self-sustaining communities – with the significant exception of creating a functional regional public transit system – does not require significant outlays of cash or expensive, “magic bullet” mega projects. “Instead of spending millions to lure or bail out factories,” Florida explains, “or hundreds of millions and in some cases billions to build stadiums, convention centers, and hotels, use that money to invest in local assets, spur local business formation and development, better employ local people and utilize their skills, and invest in improving quality of place. (p. 84, emphasis added)
Some development experts – taking their cues from Jane Jacobs’ pioneering investigation of the most successful and enduring urban ecologies – are heralding the shift away from the old paradigm of vastly expensive mega-development projects (and, as we observe in Jacksonville, their lucrative potential for insider deals and corruption) as a fundamental strategy for preparing for the new post-reset economy. As one developer relates, “[E]fforts to support local entrepreneurship, build and mature local clusters, develop arts and cultural industries, support local festivals and tourism, attract and retain people – efforts that he and his peers would have jeered at a decade or two ago – a have become the core stuff of economic development.” (p. 85)
What, Now?
Aside from all of the remedial, community-building work that will be required to replicate the functional regional ecologies of more economically successful areas, Northeast Florida still boasts a superb natural environment that may serve to help attract the kinds of creative residents that it needs to grow and prosper. The problem is, if we continue to insist upon seeing this unique natural heritage as merely the backdrop (to be bulldozed for more McMansions, strip malls and Big Box stores whenever our politicians deem it necessary) for more dysfunctional suburban growth for growth’s sake as opposed to an actual attractant, then we are condemning ourselves – as strongly implied by Florida’s narrative – to become a permanent economic and social backwater. Likewise, Jacksonville’s continual failure to embrace progressive, pro-active planning has already cost us dearly in our competition with other cities, and bodes to cause even more harm in a reset environment.
Similarly, Jacksonville has a rich (if mostly ignored) culture of diversity in which people form all over the world have helped to create many of our must cherished local institutions. Building on this heritage – or rebuilding as in the case of LaVilla –Jacksonville stands ready either to emulate the success of other creative cosmopolitan centers such as Tampa, New Orleans, and Atlanta, or to become even more divided and dysfunctional in the future. Again, we do not need any more magic bullets (courtesy of the JEDC) and grand, graft-ridden urban development schemes to make this happen. Rather, we need the kind of creative, human scale, neighborhood-building development efforts that Florida describes.
Finally, what is needed in Jacksonville – more than anything else – is a change in its traditional political leadership. For the well-entrenched Powers That Be, no matter how Jacksonville might falter in the Great Reset, their pockets will always be filled and their luxurious lifestyle will never be compromised. For the rest of us, however, our future as a successful and sustainable community is directly linked to a new leadership that has both the understanding – and the incentive – put such a better vision of the future into place.
Review essay by Milt Hays, Jr.
Florida’s thesis, briefly summarized, is that we are now in the midst of an epochal social and economic transformation of the same magnitude as the Long Depression of the late 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. In each instance, the trajectory of existing modes of development reached and, inevitably, overshot its sustainable limits, thus occasioning a crisis in terms of finding a new balance – a better “spatial fix,” to use the author’s term – between technology, geography, and powers of human adaptation. “Great Resets,” Florida observes, “are broad and fundamental transformations of the economic and social order, and involve much more than strictly economic or financial events.” In all such cases, he continues,
Quote
“A true Reset transforms not simply the way we innovate and produce but also ushers in a whole new economic landscape. As it takes shape around new infrastructure and systems of transportation, it gives rise to new housing patterns, realigning where and how we live and work. Eventually, it ushers in a whole new way of life – defined by new wants and needs and new models of consumption that spur the economy, enabling industry to expand and productivity to improve, while creating new and better jobs for workers.” (Florida, p. 5, emphasis added)
In the first Great Reset, marked by the end of agriculture and the existing pattern of rural settlement as the dominant modes in our national life, Americans creatively adapted the new technological innovations (railroads, streetcars, elevators, telephones, electricity, etc.) and social infrastructure (factories, public education, and a plethora of new social and political organizations) of the late 19th century to build the great industrial cities of that era. By the late 1920s, however, the Fordist paradigm had begun to falter under the weight of its own internal contradictions and, typically, overshot into another speculative bubble similar to the one that preceded it in 1873. At this point, a new set of social and spatial innovations – think cars, highways, shopping malls, and single-family homes – came together to create the transforming engine of suburbia.
Today – witness the crash of the real estate/speculative finance bubble and the myriad social costs of our expensive fixation with owning and operating our McMansions and SUVs – the paradigm of suburban growth has reached and overshot its functional limits. In the present case, Florida believes that the emerging new spatial fix will involve the flowering of a number of incipient megaregions in which existing, highly flexible and creative cities (or clusters of cities) will become fully integrated with their suburban hinterlands to create a new centers of human productivity*.
“Megaregions,” he continues, “are to our time what suburbanization was to the postwar era. They provide the seeds of a new spatial fix. They expand and intensify our use of land and space the way that the industrial city during the First Reset and suburbia did during the Second.” (p. 144) In Florida’s view, each of these periodic crises and responses represents a “great reset” to new modes of thinking and living, and we had better get about the business of accommodating ourselves to this realty.
*Ironically, we may have come full circle back to the concept of regionalism that was championed by Benton MacKaye at about the time of the last great reset. Indeed, as Florida suggests, our ability to think from a truly regional perspective may be one of the greatest tests of our willingness to change.
Thinking Anew: Applying the Lessons of the Great Reset to Jacksonville
Seen from the perspective of The Great Reset, the problem for Jacksonville – which, curiously, is nowhere mentioned in the book – is threefold. First, like many other Sunbelt cities, our local economy (or, to use the older term, our economic base), not to mention our very perception of reality, became fixated on what Florida calls “the great growth illusion of development for development’s sake.”
(1) Acknowledging the End of Development for Development's Sake
“New housing development,” Florida observes, “brought shopping malls, with chain restaurants, big-box stores, and the like providing at least the semblance of expand-ing jobs and growth. Of course, all these new homes needed furniture, electronics, appliances, granite countertops, window treatments, and more, necessitating even more retail. And the people flocking there needed more and more cars, which meant more car dealerships and ultimately more roads. The syndrome spilled over to the public sector. Cities grew, tax coffers filled, spending increased, and the people just kept coming. Yet the boom neither followed nor resulted in the development of sustainable, scalable, highly productive industries or services. It was fueled and funded by housing, and housing was its primary product. In this debt-intoxicated, crazy real estate bubble era, whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes.” (p. 93, emphasis added)
While Florida does not expressly note the political ramifications of this pattern of development, it is worth observing that here in Jacksonville, the local suburban growth-home building lobby has historically determined who gets selected – and has their campaigns funded – for public office. Likewise, their ability to withhold advertising acts as a powerful check on “allowable discourse” about planning for our future in our local media outlets. Whether or not Jacksonville can reshape its economic base into something that is more sustainable in the long term – and adjust its politics accordingly – is, of course, one of the questions at the heart of the Great Reset.
(2) Identifying and Strengthening Jacksonville’s Regional Context
Our second problem is that while Jacksonville's local economy, like many other Sunbelt cities, has been hobbled and distorted by the suburban “growth illusion” (see Chapter 14 for the details), we – unfortunately – do not fit the emerging spatial pattern of many other southern cities that, according to Florida, seem likely to evolve into tightly integrated megaregions. As he outlines in Chapter 18, The Great Resettle, “The future of urban development belongs to a larger kind of geographic unit that has emerged over the last several decades: the megaregion. People around the globe are crowding into the world’s most promising megaregions – the concentrations of population that encompass several cities and their surrounding suburban rings – that have grown swiftly in recent years.” (p. 142)
Going on to describe such emerging southern megaregions of Char-lanta (Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham), Dal-Austin (Dallas and Austin), Hou-Orleans (Houston and New Orleans), and So-Flo (Miami, Orlando, and Tampa), the author sets out an extensive and amply documented brief that such aggregations of talented people and new technologies will be the primary engines of economic regeneration in a post reset world.
If, as Florida suggests, such multi-nucleated, transit-linked megaregions represent the future, what does this mean for Jacksonville? Lacking the kind of spatial synergy that he sees emerging out of the increasing interconnectedness of the Miami-Orlando-Tampa megaregion, where do we go from here? The obvious approach, applying the same lessons to our single city-centered region, would be to embark on the very same kind of thoughtful integration of our existing urban center(s) with our suburban hinterland.
(3) Resetting Our Local Thinking
If Jacksonville can apply the same lessons of history and geography that have enabled cities like Boston, Pittsburgh, and Charlotte to weather the current economic storm, we may also prosper in the future as they have. In order to do this, however, we must first abandon the “suburban growth illusion” (and its self serving, backward-looking politics) and replace it with a much more functional concept of regional planning. Drawing on the specific insights of The Great Reset, here are several things that we absolutely must do.
Identifying and Creating Our Future Economic Base
As noted earlier, perhaps the most difficult challenge that Jacksonville faces is rebuilding a “real,” sustainable economy to replace the “development for development’s sake” bubble economy of the recent past. As the author indicates in his chapter on the emerging characteristics of the post-reset economy, “We are living through an even more powerful and fundamental economic shift, from an industrial system to an economy that is increasingly powered by knowledge, creativity, and ideas.” (p. 111)
While we have the advantage of an established and growing international port and at least the nucleus of several more traditional industries, what kinds of things – in the author’s words – will Jacksonville be doing in the future to provide needed goods and services to the rest of the world? Similarly, can Jacksonville successfully transition from its traditional low wage, low skill “plantation model” to deliberately creating the kind of creative, flexible “economic ecology” that has powered economic sustainability in other areas? And what, exactly, will it take to do this?
Integrating Jacksonville into a True Regional Community
The second of these necessary transformations, the heart of the current reset process as Florida suggests, is creating the new transportation infrastructure to link Jacksonville’s more densely populated urban centers with its suburban hinterland. As he points out again and again (see Chapter 21 for the specific details), the connectivity of public transit is absolutely vital to restructuring of our post-crash way of life, and we had best get on with the business of doing this as quickly as we can. Building still more roads – and the proposed Outer Beltway boondoggle is the absolute, howling antithesis of everything that Florida is writing about – and pouring yet more public funds into a failed and increasingly dysfunctional paradigm will do nothing to make Jacksonville a better or more economically productive place to live in. Beginning to connect the pieces of our own small region into a more vital and functionally integrated whole will ensure our place in the future, if we have the courage to insist on it. Quoting Florida once again,
Quote
“It’s time to start thinking of transit and infrastructure projects less in political terms [as we are currently doing here in Cowford] and more as a set of strategic investments, as fundamental to the speed and scope of our economic recovery as they are to the emerging shape of the economy, society, and communities of the future. Critics point out the high cost of high-speed rail [or light rail and trolley-based transit systems] and believe that we’ll never see a return on the investment. But strict cost-benefit calculations miss the broader economic benefits that come from new infrastructure. Past investments in railroad lines and highways [as observed in the prior great resets] spurred development of real estate and of industries that far outstripped anything we could imagine at the time.” (p. 170, emphasis added)
The irony – and hopefully not the tragedy – of Jacksonville’s situation is that we already have both the means and most of the necessary funding already largely in place to accomplish this kind of fundamentally necessary transformation. This applies not only to linking together the disconnected pieces of our downtown, but building the light rail lines that will, as Florida proposes, make us more productive and sustainable in the long run. As he restates this part of his thesis, “To ensure a true, lasting recovery, we’ll need to mobilize and guide these shifting forces so that they come together into a workable system. A new spatial fix – a new [transportation-based] geography of working and living – will be our only path back to renewed economic growth, confidence, and prosperity.” (p. 107)
So Why Should Anyone Want to Move to Jacksonville? Rebuilding and Enhancing Our Quality of Life
In the post-reset America that Florida describes, younger workers (whose education, talents, and creativity will help transform their destination’s economy) will naturally gravitate to those functional, spatially integrated regions that offer them the most in terms of providing a dense network of career and social opportunities, but they are vitally concerned with other quality of life issues as well. In describing current research into the location decisions of younger, better educated workers, Florida notes that “In these highly mobile and economically tumultuous times, career success for young people depends on locating themselves in a thick labor market that offers diverse and abundant job opportunities.” At the same time, however, their prospective jobs were not their highest ranked factor.
Quote
“Across the board, the survey respondents said that the ability to meet people and make friends was of paramount importance. These young people intuitively understand what economic sociologists have documented: that vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and securing personal happiness. … They recognize what psychologists of happiness have shown: it’s not money per se that makes you happy but rather doing exciting work and having fulfilling personal relationships.” (p. 148, emphasis added)
If these are indeed the attitudes shared by the kinds of younger people who create vibrant, sustainable economies, why, indeed, should people like this want to settle in our smallish, rather isolated region? Worse, on closer inspection, Jacksonville, the incipient regional core, suffers from so many seemingly intractable problems – lingering divisions across race and income lines (the “two cities” problem), a faltering, equally divided public school system that fails to graduate more than a third of its students, a spatially isolated, dysfunctional downtown core, and the “leadership” of an entrenched political machine that despises planning and whose only concern appears to be lining the pockets of the well-connected political camp followers that congregate around City Hall – that it is sometimes hard to imagine how things might ever be changed.
Perhaps the most hopeful news for Jacksonville, as Florida suggests, is that the road to building stimulating and self-sustaining communities – with the significant exception of creating a functional regional public transit system – does not require significant outlays of cash or expensive, “magic bullet” mega projects. “Instead of spending millions to lure or bail out factories,” Florida explains, “or hundreds of millions and in some cases billions to build stadiums, convention centers, and hotels, use that money to invest in local assets, spur local business formation and development, better employ local people and utilize their skills, and invest in improving quality of place. (p. 84, emphasis added)
Some development experts – taking their cues from Jane Jacobs’ pioneering investigation of the most successful and enduring urban ecologies – are heralding the shift away from the old paradigm of vastly expensive mega-development projects (and, as we observe in Jacksonville, their lucrative potential for insider deals and corruption) as a fundamental strategy for preparing for the new post-reset economy. As one developer relates, “[E]fforts to support local entrepreneurship, build and mature local clusters, develop arts and cultural industries, support local festivals and tourism, attract and retain people – efforts that he and his peers would have jeered at a decade or two ago – a have become the core stuff of economic development.” (p. 85)
What, Now?
Aside from all of the remedial, community-building work that will be required to replicate the functional regional ecologies of more economically successful areas, Northeast Florida still boasts a superb natural environment that may serve to help attract the kinds of creative residents that it needs to grow and prosper. The problem is, if we continue to insist upon seeing this unique natural heritage as merely the backdrop (to be bulldozed for more McMansions, strip malls and Big Box stores whenever our politicians deem it necessary) for more dysfunctional suburban growth for growth’s sake as opposed to an actual attractant, then we are condemning ourselves – as strongly implied by Florida’s narrative – to become a permanent economic and social backwater. Likewise, Jacksonville’s continual failure to embrace progressive, pro-active planning has already cost us dearly in our competition with other cities, and bodes to cause even more harm in a reset environment.
Similarly, Jacksonville has a rich (if mostly ignored) culture of diversity in which people form all over the world have helped to create many of our must cherished local institutions. Building on this heritage – or rebuilding as in the case of LaVilla –Jacksonville stands ready either to emulate the success of other creative cosmopolitan centers such as Tampa, New Orleans, and Atlanta, or to become even more divided and dysfunctional in the future. Again, we do not need any more magic bullets (courtesy of the JEDC) and grand, graft-ridden urban development schemes to make this happen. Rather, we need the kind of creative, human scale, neighborhood-building development efforts that Florida describes.
Finally, what is needed in Jacksonville – more than anything else – is a change in its traditional political leadership. For the well-entrenched Powers That Be, no matter how Jacksonville might falter in the Great Reset, their pockets will always be filled and their luxurious lifestyle will never be compromised. For the rest of us, however, our future as a successful and sustainable community is directly linked to a new leadership that has both the understanding – and the incentive – put such a better vision of the future into place.
Review essay by Milt Hays, Jr.