Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to correct the date of the Downtown Investment Authority meeting. It is on Wednesday, not Thursday. We regret the error.

After repeated attempts, against significant community opposition, a proposal to develop self-storage units on a prime corner in Downtown’s Southbank neighborhood is back. Atlanta-based developer The Simpson Organization is putting forth the proposal that would require a rezoning and taxpayer incentives to construct a 10-story building to include 100 low-income housing units, 550-600 self-storage units and retail space. On Wednesday, the Downtown Investment Authority will vote whether to support the first of several layers of subsidies required to develop this mixed-used self-storage facility at the corner of Hendricks Avenue and Prudential Drive.  

In order to fill financial gaps associated with providing rent-subsidized apartments, the DIA will consider loaning the development team a $600,000 Affordable Housing Support Loan payable at an interest rate of 1% over 20 years.  Funding rent-subsidized apartment complexes require the use of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, a federal tax incentive administered by the Florida Housing Finance Corporation. Low Income Housing Tax Credits issued through the state of Florida are highly competitive, as funding exists for only a handful of projects each year. Having local municipal participation is considered a crucial element of successful awards of these extremely limited funds. So, the Downtown Investment Authority created the Affordable Housing Support Loan in 2022 to provide a non-competitive funding program for developers of affordable housing to be able to leverage the state financing.  

If this proposed development is awarded the state-administered financing, the developer will then come back to the DIA to request a $6 million loan with a below-market interest rate, and likely some form of REV grants to refund a portion of their property taxes. In effect, Wednesday’s DIA meeting will be the first step toward publicly incentivizing these self-storage units — even though Downtown, St. Nicholas and San Marco residents and business owners are overwhelmingly opposed to such a use that was outright banned from this portion of Downtown a mere five years ago.

The developer has twice tried, and failed, to move forward with plans to place self-storage units here. Downtown’s Southbank is already plagued by dead space, and allowing more self-storage units simply serves to further stifle a key street that is intersected by hotels, offices, restaurants, multifamily buildings and a long-awaited megaproject known as RiversEdge.

The developer has previously retained high-profile land-use attorneys and lobbyists in the hopes of pushing through a development that the community has pushed back against since 2021. In 2023, despite former Mayor Lenny Curry’s administration trying to tip the scales in the developer’s favor, City Council voted against the previous rezoning request on a 9-9 vote. Now, the developer has enlisted the services of another high-profile local housing developer in Vestcor, who currently holds tens of millions of taxpayer-financed loans for housing projects throughout the Downtown Investment Authority’s boundaries, from below-market-rate loans on market-rate housing such as the Carling and 11 East Forsyth, to a series of affordable housing projects in Brooklyn, the Cathedral District  and LaVilla. 

For Vestcor, this deal makes financial sense. They previously had this property assemblage under contract in 2021 for a Lofts of the Southbank affordable housing apartment and retail project. That deal fell apart when Vestcor was unable to attain the highly competitive and extremely limited low income housing tax credits from the Florida Housing and Finance Corp.

By partnering with The Simpson Organization, Vestcor is avoiding certain capital contributions (i.e. the purchase price of the land) that they would have had to fund if they were pursuing the original Lofts of the Southbank apartment and retail project on their own.

The project also relies on an almost $5 million deferred developer fee. Quite simply, a developer fee is cash received by the development team once a project is complete or drawn out progressively when certain development thresholds are met. It acts as an incentive for completing a project on time and within budget. A deferred developer fee can be best described as a form of sweat equity, allowing Vestcor to essentially bring less cash up front. This is an extreme oversimplification as a deferred developer fee can also be counted as debt on the balance sheet and likely will be paid back over time, but breaking this down requires more than two sentences and is irrelevant to the larger issue: Self storage units are being publicly incentivized Downtown by Duval County taxpayers (or more accurately, on Duval County Taxpayers’ credit card). 

By partnering with Vestcor, The Simpson Organization believes they have a path forward to what the developer previously told the Downtown Development Review Board would be “the most successful” of the 24 self-storage projects they have developed.

After Vestcor’s original Lofts of the Southbank project never materialized, Simpson swooped in to aggressively push for a project that would be in direct conflict with the Downtown Overlay zoning and redevelopment plan established after considerable input by the public and development community in 2019. Although self-storage units are specifically not allowed on the Southbank, the development team is attempting to exploit a perceived loophole whereas the overlay does not prohibit mixed-used development that includes integrated self-storage. 

This mixed-use loophole is what led to the eventual approval of a two-story gas station in Downtown’s historic LaVilla neighborhood. The previous Simpson “mixed-use” proposed development included 80% self-storage units and 20% retail space, with very limited on-site parking. Now they are partnering with Vestcor to present a project that includes four floors of up to 100 rent-subsidized apartment units, four floors of roughly 136,000 square feet of self-storage units (Which could equate to anywhere between 550-600 storage units depending on configurations), a structured parking garage and 14,500 square feet of retail space within four bays (one of which would include the customer-facing retail needs of the self-storage facility). 

The bottom line is that this proposal is not consistent with creating a vibrant, walkable Downtown. Furthermore, the public incentives required to make this project work create a dangerous precedent for future developers looking to build incompatible uses in our Downtown, which desperately needs new development that enhances, not detracts from creating a walkable and vibrant environment. 

Further, the size of the building, 10 stories, is vastly out of scale with surrounding buildings, which do not exceed five stories. In fact, this 10-story building, with roughly half of its frontage made up of blank, windowless walls, directly abuts the oldest remaining residential building from the city of South Jacksonville — 1451 Home St., built in 1909. Other nearby structures include the single-story City Grille and Raw Bar restaurant and the single-story bb’s Restaurant and Bar, which itself includes portions of the building that have historic designations prohibiting their demolition.

This corner, flanked by three hotels, serves as the centerpiece to the Southbank’s pedestrian experience. When visitors to our community book rooms at the Marriott, Hilton Garden Inn, Extended Stay America, or even the nearby Doubletree by Hilton, they will be met with a monstrous building dedicated to self-storage units.

Jacksonville, like already vibrant cities Savannah, Charleston and Denver, has restricted the proliferation of self-storage units in this area for good reason. Now, visitors looking to attend concerts, festivals or football games could soon be met with a massive self-storage building looming that creates an imposing barrier towards the desire to walk past to find potential places to eat and shop along bustling Hendricks Avenue or Kings Avenue.

The potential to revitalize Kings Avenue was recently buoyed by relaxing requirements for on-site liquor sales, and at least one business has already opened as the result of these changes.

The self-storage units that already exist Downtown have proven unequivocally that they attract homeless and shady characters that congregate (and sometimes temporarily camp) outside, creating an uncomfortable environment that would scare off out-of-town families visiting Downtown. They are in effect beacons of blight.  

Not only would the scale of the building and proposed use contribute negatively to the pedestrian experience, but taxpayers are being asked to publicly subsidize self-storage units. That’s a bridge too far. A taxpayer-funded incentive package should have a much higher standard than helping to usher in self-storage units, especially after the elimination of such a use from this and nearby sites was enacted in 2019, and after more than 200 residents and surrounding property owners came out in 2023 to oppose such a use.

A path forward

A more appropriate path would be to work with Vestcor to be the sole developer on a mixed-use project that does not include self-storage units. This may require additional local participation in the forms of higher cash completion grants to offset the land acquisition costs, or an outright purchase by DIA with an extremely low-cost ground lease to Vestcor. Although not ideal, this path would provide a far superior project that would more fittingly support the residents, property owners and hard-working entrepreneurs who have invested in this area for years.

Without the housing, this project wouldn’t have a prayer of moving forward. And without incentives, the housing portion doesn’t work. The simple answer is to remove the unwanted use and negotiate an incentive package for what matters: affordable housing with ground-floor retail space.

Get involved

Affordable housing is a critical need in Jacksonville. But is this truly quality affordable housing? Should rent-subsidized tenants have to deal with the negative externalities that a self-storage facility would bring on site? A typical tenant who would qualify for housing in this project would earn 80% of the area’s median income. An example would be a single mother, who is employed as a third-year Duval County public school teacher, or a recent honorably discharged Navy veteran who just joined the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office as a Community Service Officer. Living on top of a potentially 500-plus-unit self-storage facility means that these working-class public servants will be dealing with a constant stream of U-haul vans, unhoused drifters entering and exiting their rented storage units, and the potential rodent problems inherent when hoarded junk is poorly stored. Vestcor’s Lofts products that already exist throughout Downtown are generally well-constructed and well-managed.  Why subject this quality product to the adverse consequences that self-storage units bring?

To make your thoughts known ahead of Wednesday’s DIA meeting, a list of contacts for individual DIA board members can be found here.

I’m an otherwise YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) advocate. Here’s my take on denying another affordable housing project based on particularly arbitrary reasons, despite the overwhelmingly positive outcomes that the project would employ. Here’s my take on a Murray Hill self-storage unit, which was vehemently opposed by neighborhood residents and business owners. It was my opinion then as it is now that opposition in that case should have taken a backseat towards focusing on viable solutions that would have improved a product in which the property’s underlying zoning allowed for that proposed use by right. But this Southbank use is not allowed by right and frankly, not wanted.  Affordable housing is desirable, and the DIA must work with Vestcor to do whatever is possible to make a standalone Lofts of the Southbank development financially viable without an attached self-storage component. That scenario was once a possibility for this site in 2021, and should again be a possibility in 2024 and beyond. But the proposed use is out-of-scale, and out-of-character for this site. In this case, my YIMBY-ism is taking a back seat to reality.  And the reality is, that it is a sad state of affairs when the discussion about Downtown development over the past five years has centered around two-story gas stations, being the only city in the country to demolish and not redevelop its festival marketplace, and 10-story self-storage units. We must do better.  

Mike Field is formerly a Southbank resident and currently resides in San Marco.