Published on November 20, 2024 at 10:39 am
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The Laura Street Trio are irreplaceable historic buildings located on a corridor that’s vital to Downtown’s resurgence. Despite the city of Jacksonville and business community’s pulling out all the stops to save and restore the Trio, owner Steve Atkins and SouthEast Development Group have been unable to close the deal for over a decade. For the sake of this crucial Downtown property, it’s time for new ownership.
The background
The three buildings making up the Laura Street Trio date to the years of Jacksonville’s rebirth after the Great Fire of 1901. The oldest is the Florida National Bank Building (the Marble Bank), located at the corner of Laura and Forsyth streets. Opened in 1902, it’s today flanked by two Prairie School highrises designed by legendary Jacksonville architect Henry John Klutho: the Bisbee Building (1909) and the Florida Life Building (1912), two of the earliest “skyscrapers” in Florida’s history.
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The Trio’s significance as a unit is greater than the sum of its parts. The buildings’ unique configuration and location at one of the busiest and most walkable corners in Downtown Jacksonville makes them a lynchpin to the revival of the city center Jaxsons have hoped for for decades. Unfortunately, since being shuttered in the 1980s and ’90s, the buildings have sat vacant and deteriorating.
Across many years, city government leaders, the historic preservation community and the business sector have seen the great potential of the Laura Street Trio and have worked to craft plans that would bring new life to them. In 2002, the city purchased the buildings with the intention of transferring them to a developer who could restore them. After they were back in private hands, the city continued to work toward redevelopment by authorizing a series of generous and forward-thinking incentives packages.
In 2010, developer Steve Atkins and SouthEast Development Group announced the first of many proposals that – with substantial investment from the city of Jacksonville – would not only save and restore the Trio but also the nearby Barnett Building, and construct new buildings and a parking garage across Forsyth Street to serve the whole project. Urban core advocates, The Jaxson included, were optimistic.
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Early issues: The Barnett and mixed-use garage
Atkins finalized purchase of the properties in 2013, but most of the promised redevelopment has never materialized. The Barnett was the first phase to start, helped along by a $3 million loan from Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s Stache Investments. That partnership ended in foreclosure in 2015 after two years of failed starts. The Barnett project finally got off the ground when the city of Jacksonville pumped $9.8 million in incentives into it, and it opened at last in September 2019. Five years later, it remains the only part of the wider project that SouthEast Development Group has completed.
Similar issues plagued the mixed-use parking garage on Forsyth Street that was planned to serve the Barnett, Laura Street Trio and the new buildings. SouthEast’s development agreement said the garage must reach substantial completion within three months of the Barnett, but no work had begun by the time the Barnett opened. The Downtown Development Authority board partially terminated the agreement and VyStar Credit Union stepped in to build the garage, which opened in 2023, with some spaces reserved for potential future use by the other buildings. Meanwhile, SouthEast turned its efforts to the Laura Street Trio.
Redevelopment dreams deferred
SouthEast’s plans for the Laura Street Trio were always ambitious, with the three historic buildings being worked into a larger complex of new construction that included hotel rooms, retail space and restaurants. Since 2017, the DIA and City Council have authorized generous incentives packages to make them work.
In 2017, City Council approved $5.8 million in grants for the Trio (in addition to the Barnett incentives), which totaled about 13% of the project’s estimated cost of $44.6 million. Work had not begun when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and severely disrupted construction and supply chains across the world. In 2021, SouthEast made a new proposal, requesting $26.7 million in incentives, which made up nearly 38% of the new estimated $70.5 million total. Owing to the buildings’ importance to Jacksonville, the city council approved this plan as well.
However, SouthEast Development Group was still unable to move the project forward. In June 2023, they came back yet again with a proposal that more than doubled the amount of incentives requested to $63.6 million on a project whose costs had risen to $176.3 million.
City officials wisely balked at this huge price tag, as well as the comparatively small amount of equity being put in by the developers and the decade-long lack of progress. Despite the incentives previously approved by the city, the buildings have been poorly maintained and are frequent targets of vandals and graffiti taggers. By August 2024, the properties had racked up $800,000 in code violations. Meanwhile, SouthEast returned with a further proposal requesting even more taxpayer money – $87 million.
The city rightly didn’t accept, and with no workable deal in sight, Jacksonville’s General Counsel filed a suit to foreclose on the $800,000 liens. The city subsequently suspended this suit and reopened negotiations when the developers agreed in principle to a 10-point set of terms. But SouthEast’s response was to submit a request that not only deviated from these terms, it further ballooned the incentives request to $96.8 million. Earlier this month, the city permanently ended negotiations with SouthEast and refiled the foreclosure suit.
Time for new ownership
Negotiations over the Laura Street Trio have now spanned four mayoral administrations, three DIA heads, and five city council terms, and as should be expected of a project this important, incentives offered have been more than generous. There’s one constant in each of the failed plans, false starts and continued deterioration of the Trio over the years: the developers in charge.
It’s unfortunate that SouthEast hasn’t presented a workable deal after so many years, and equally unfortunate that it deferred maintenance to the point that the city had to foreclose on the liens. While the Laura Street Trio deal is complex and ambitious, it’s certainly not impossible. In fact, the city has had recent success incentivizing major projects. Just this August, the city approved an even bigger incentive for an even bigger project when it finalized a $98.6 million package for the $418 million Pearl Street District. The first phase of the even larger Gateway Project, the Pearl Street District broke ground in October and construction is underway.
It’s long past time for Steve Atkins and SouthEast Development Group to read the writing on the wall and sell the buildings – and barring that, the foreclosure should proceed. If they had been sold to a developer who could execute a plan after one of the previous missed marks, construction might be well on the way by now, if not completed.
It’s well past time the Laura Street Trio was in the hands of someone who can close a fiscally responsible deal that allows these historic buildings to take their rightful place as a cornerstone to Downtown’s revival.
