Kings Trail deal in San Jose shows toll of challenging a big developer

After months pushing for changes to a proposed housing development, residents of San Jose chose to stay quiet Tuesday night as the Jacksonville City Council cleared the way for a 110-home project at the shuttered Kings Trail Elementary site.

Council voted 17-0 to approve Ordinance 2026-0477 and Ordinance 2026-0478 with the application by high-profile builder Dream Finders Homes to rezone the 12.41-acre site and amend the current land use to allow the project to move forward.

The decision comes about a year after the Duval County School District permanently closed the elementary school as part of an effort to cut costs.

Dream Finders’ pitch to the Jacksonville Planning Commission, which recommended approval of the rezoning in July, was for 110 residential cottages or townhomes. The company said it was considering making the community for ages 55-plus. But the developer has represented the project in front of council as single-family homes.

Chrissy Kinne is the government relations officer for the San Jose Neighborhood Association, a longtime resident of the area and one of the group’s lead spokespersons. The association represents 1,800 homes — 1,100 that are homesteaded.

The association found out last year that a potential buyer wanted to redevelop the Kings Trail site and had filed the rezoning and land use change application with the city’s Planning Department. The group then reached out to get a meeting with Dream Finder’s lobbyist Paul Harden.

San Jose residents had five requested changes to the land use and rezoning criteria.

• The biggest concern is traffic. Kinne and the association wanted to see an access road, from the development to Powers Avenue, to not overwhelm Old Kings Road.

• Instead of tearing out 1.44 acres of wetlands and Ancient Oak Trees to build a retention pond, the group asked for that to remain untouched. Kinne says in the last several years San Jose has been losing its established tree canopy to other infill development.

• The association also asked for a landscape buffer between the development and the existing neighborhood, assurances that it would be a 55-plus community and limits on how tall Dream Finders could build the homes.

Council member Joe Carlucci had a floor amendment Tuesday that, while it did not address the traffic concerns, did incorporated some of the group’s requests.

Dream Finders must install a minimum 6-foot-high vinyl fence between Old Kings Road and the site as well a landscape buffer. Council also reduced the building height allowed from 35 feet to 30 feet.

“Myself along with the San Jose Neighborhood Association are not asking you to change Jacksonville law, neither asking to impose new requirements or unreasonable burdens on this applicant,” Kinne told the council’s Land Use and Zoning Committee on Aug. 4.

The association claimed Dream Finder’s submission to the Planning Commission did not comply as written with the city’s Comprehensive Plan.

“That burden belongs to the applicant, not to this neighborhood,” she said Aug. 4.

The San Jose group got involved in a similar rezoning effort in 2024 of the closed duPont YMCA Youth Development Campus that abuts the Kings Trail Elementary property. Homes were never built there, but Kinne says the association predicts development of the school site could renew interest in the building homes on the YMCA property, too.

Initially, Kinne said Harden and the Planning Commission staff appeared receptive to homeowners’ request.

“I think our hope is that the land actually gets used for something of real benefit to the public. If that’s development, if that’s a park, if it’s community greenspace, if it’s another school or a public school, we’re not saying that we have the answer to what it should be,” Kinne told Jacksonville Today. “That’s up to the property owner to decide.”

Council member Michael Boylan was excused from Tuesday’s meeting, and council member Rory Diamond was absent for the land use and rezoning votes.

Conditions to redevelop Kings Trail

Carlucci’s floor amendment Tuesday kept in place the Planning Department’s stipulation for a traffic study of the development’s effect in the surrounding area, unless the planning director decides it’s not needed.

City planning officials said Aug. 4 that they expect the housing project to add 1,000 daily vehicle trips to Old Kings Road and that it could handle the new load.

The San Jose association hired an independent traffic engineer who disagreed and said Old Kings Road was not a proper collector road as the Planning Department asserts.

The city declined to entertain the neighborhood’s request to improve an existing connector and build more roadway for cars to leave the housing development through Powers Avenue. Harden said that request was not possible.

“Everything they asked for we complied with except for the road. We can’t build a $2 million road on somebody else’s land when we have capacity on the road immediately fronting the site,” Harden said at the Aug. 4 committee meeting.

On Tuesday, council member Matt Carlucci got Harden to make a verbal agreement to plant more trees on the newly required land buffer on Old Kings Road as a way to “soften” the new development’s appearance from existing homes.

David vs. Goliath?

The school district still owns the property, but council’s decision to approve the land use and rezoning make it more likely Dream Finders and school district officials will finalize the sale.

In February, the the Jacksonville-based homebuilder signed a sale agreement and agreed to put a $25,000 deposit down on the site. The deal would ultimately sell the former school property at 7401 Old Kings Road to Dream Finders for $3.75 million.

The building was included in a group of six elementary schools that the school board voted in 2024 to close and is now considered surplus property by the district.

Kinne says the San Jose association hit a similar wall that nearly all residents trying to pull concessions from big developers find — money and time. Jacksonville-based Dream Finders is a publicly traded company with 1,911 employees and $4.32 billion in total revenue in 2025.

It’s a big political donor both in Florida and locally in Jacksonville and to candidates in both major political parties. For example, the company has donated $150,000 to Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donald’s political committee, Friends of Byron Donalds.

Some of its Jacksonville contributions include $25,000 to council member Kevin Carrico’s JAX Good Government committee and $55,000 to Mayor Donna Deegan’s committee Duval for All.

The developer’s lobbyist, Harden, is a fixture at City Hall with a client list that boasts the Jacksonville Jaguars and owner Shad Khan, Wawa Inc., a list of other large development groups, and Dream Finder’s founder and President Patrick Zalupski.

Meanwhile, the officers and members of the San Jose Neighborhood Association are volunteers, and the organization is funded by optional dues. Kinne is a retired ballroom dancer who moved to Jacksonville to “peacefully retire” years ago.

Association member decided to make the case to the Planning Commission and council themselves and did not hire an attorney to represent them.

“Never, ever in the milion years did I think I’d have to learn land use law,” Kinne said.

The organization, formed in 2024, and the neighborhood loosely organized to push for changes to the YMCA property rezoning.

Before the vote Tuesday, Kinne was unable to say whether the association would continue to fight for traffic changes in and out of the development. But as the district prepares to sell other surplus properties like Ortega Elementary, and as the need for housing in Duval County continues to grow, Kinne says their back-and-forth with Dream Finders could give other neighborhoods a clue about what to expect.

Kinne says the the entire process has been equal to 55,000 pages of documents and a lot of in-kind time.

“These things get very expensive, more in heart and soul and time than anything else. But the financial element is real. We don’t have teams of engineers and contractors and lawyers and staff to do desktopping and get out information. All of that is left on us,” Kinne said. “And we didn’t really know what we’re supposed to do most of the time because we’re working with a moving target.”