Recently opened businesses, like Blue Hen Cafe, dot West King Street, the main commercial thoroughfare of the West City neighborhood in St. Augustine. | Noah Hertz, Jacksonville Today
Published on June 26, 2025 at 2:07 pm
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A new plan by the city of St. Augustine aims to bring new life to a part of town that hasn’t received the same attention as the rest of the historic city. That’s why city leaders agreed this week to adopt a 30-year plan to funnel money into the community and revitalize it.
Community Redevelopment Agency Manager Jaime Perkins says the new West City Community Redevelopment Agency will give the city the tools — and the funds — to fix up the streets, keep people in their family homes and boost business.
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But the plan isn’t to turn West King Street into a new St. George Street.
“I think downtown is downtown,” Perkins tells Jacksonville Today. “It’s our historic downtown area, and you can’t mimic that. I think West City has its own flair, and I think what we want to do is amplify what’s already happening in the western part of the city.”
CRAs work by sectioning off an area that could use improvement and setting aside money generated by increasing property values to go straight back into local rejuvenation.
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It will take time for the agency to build up the funds necessary for the city’s big plans, but the anticipation is already building.
Building up
West City is growing, even it’s not growing at the rapid pace that other parts of the city are. Around 3,000 people live in the 600-acre area compared with the city’s overall population of around 15,000. And, just like other parts of St. Augustine, new business is moving in.
A breakfast spot from Lincolnville recently moved to West King Street, and a tattoo studio and bar from San Marco Avenue is among the new businesses planning to call West King home.
To harness the momentum in the area, Murphy Leathers, the owner of southern restaurant Murf’s Homestyle, has teamed up with a handful of other business owners to create a local small-business administration.
Leathers and his group have big plans, like spreading brochures around town with information about West City and launching their own annual festival.
Like Perkins, Leathers knows the growth is coming to West City. He just wants to make sure local business owners have a say in what it looks like.
“Not to use the G-word, gentrification, but we know it’s going to happen,” he says, “and we as small businesses and residents want to get ahead of it.”
Leathers says he supports the CRA plan, and he’s excited about the potential for more people to learn about what makes West City great.
“It’s a beautiful part of the city, and it’s a historic part of the city, and people need to know about it,” he says. “We’re all really supportive of the help the city is offering to give us.”
Other business owners are excited too, even if some are a little skeptical about what a growing West City might look like.
A few blocks from Murf’s is Rocking Chair Records, a new record store owned by David Smart and his fiancee, Kaileen Boccio. Their new shop is off the beaten path of West King Street, tucked into the residential area on Masters Drive.
Smart used to work at Tonevendor Records, the music shop that has served downtown St. Augustine for decades, but he got the itch to start his own shop and opened in May.
The biggest difference he immediately noticed between working in West City compared to the historic downtown was the difference in clientele — with all of the trolleys rolling around, many of the people who stop in, Smart says, are tourists.
“I definitely get a little bit of that over here,” Smart says, “but most of my customers are people who walked here from the neighborhood.”
Right now, his shop isn’t exactly accessible from West King Street, where West City’s shoppers and diners are typically concentrated. But if St. Augustine’s plans for West City go as intended, improved sidewalks will make walking around the neighborhood much easier and safer.
Smart says he’s looking forward to West City getting more attention and funding from the city, but, like Leathers, he wants to see the area grow the way the community wants it to.
“We don’t need big business coming in here making this a big tourist attraction,” Smart says. “We need a grocery store, a butcher. There’s schools in the area that could probably use money.”
Bold plans
The plans for West City are similar in some ways to what the city rolled out for the historic Lincolnville neighborhood more than a decade ago. Since then, the city’s focus has been on empowering small-business owners and helping longtime property owners stay in their homes despite rising costs.
One tool the city has used are programs like Fix-It-Up.
That program allows people who may not be able to afford costly fixes to their home to apply for a grant up to $50,000. That money can even come along with assistance from the St. Johns Housing Partnership, a local nonprofit organization focused on developing and preserving affordable housing for local residents.
Perkins says that as the specifics of the West City CRA’s plans are developed, one of the questions is whether what has worked in Lincolnville can be replicated.
In addition to housing — what Perkins calls “community stabilization” — the plan includes proposals to enhance Oyster Creek Park, open the door to potential community policing efforts and support the newly formed small-business administration.
Perkins sees all of this as an opportunity to course-correct the history of neglect in West City.
“I think CRAs are in a great position to leave the world in a better place than we found it,” Perkins says. “Make wrongs right — that’s what CRAs do, in my opinion.”
It will be some time before the CRA has the funding and capacity to really get the ball rolling on its plans, but in the meantime, Perkins says, the focus will be on education efforts and community involvement.
For more information about the West City CRA, visit the city’s website. Or read the full West City CRA plan below.
