Published on December 19, 2024 at 5:10 pm
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It’s been a big year for Downtown Jacksonville. The city agreed to fund a new stadium. Jacksonville University opened its College of Law in the historic Atlantic National Bank Building. The University of Florida announced it will soon build a graduate campus in LaVilla.
The annual State of Downtown report, out this week from the city of Jacksonville, the Downtown Investment Authority and Build Up Downtown, includes all sorts of numbers that tell the story of how Jacksonville’s epicenter fared in 2024.
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For our number this week, we’ll focus on one: The number of people who work Downtown, nearly five years after the beginning of the pandemic that changed everything: 53,450.
53,450
The number of employees based Downtown has remained relatively stable since COVID, but both time they spend in the office and the office space available have fluctuated.
According to the report, of those 50,000 or so Downtown employees, about half work remotely at least some of the time. That means only about 28,000 people are treading the floors full-time in about 8 million square feet of office space Downtown. The stubbornly high office vacancy rate is now 28%, as financial tech company FIS’s headquarters and public utility JEA’s new headquarters have added about 500,000 square feet of office space in recent years. Another 400,000 square feet of office space is currently in the works too.
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While not good news for corporate landlords, the office vacancy rate is good for Downtown businesses, which pay about $23 per square foot in rent here, a bargain compared to Florida’s other metro areas like Orlando, Tampa/St. Pete and Miami.
