Jim Citrano is president of CB Richard Ellis Commercial Real Estate and Institutional Management Services, in his third year as the chairman of the Downtown Development Authority and is on the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission. He has lived in Jacksonville since 1973 and has been with CB Richard Ellis for four and a half years. Before CB Richard Ellis, he owned his own company, St. Johns Place Development Company. He has been married to Eileen for 35 years and has four grown children, three grandchildren and two more on the way. Daily Record staff writer Michele Newbern Gillis met recently with Citrano and discussed his views on downtown and what needs to happen to make downtown commercially viable.
Question: What do you see as the future of downtown?
Answer: I think most evident is hopefully a change towards a 24-hour downtown because of residential. There are presently 1,800 units that are in the works that are either planned or have started: 11 E. Forsyth, Berkman Plaza, The Shipyards and now The Strand at St. Johns on the Southbank. The biggest difference is that where downtown was traditionally just office and headquarters, now it’s going to be residential as well.
Q: What will that do to downtown?
A: I think it will cause the city to be more open to entertainment, restaurants and facilities that people generally associate with living and that was the whole idea.
Q: Do you think downtown will be commercially viable to handle entertainment venues?
A: I do. I really do. The “how long” is the big casino and that’s the tough part. That’s what you can’t tell, and that’s where the risk comes in. Conventionally, we have enough of a population that something like that will happen, but it will take some time. And right now when you have nobody living in downtown, essentially very few people, to say all of a sudden we will have 1,800 units; it will take some time to fill those units. If I didn’t believe that that was the end of what we are trying to do, I don’t think we could do what we are doing now.
Q: Do you think people will fill them?
A: I really do. The question of how soon is the real question. From a real estate perspective, how soon means that you come a long way with a lot of money in the ground and a lot of money in construction in the development of the units. You need to get a return on them or someone else will finish the units.
Q: What problems do you see downtown?
A: I think we really suffer from the perception that downtown is a high crime area. Statistically, we know it isn’t, but there are a couple of things that contribute to that; mostly it’s the panhandlers and the night people who just roam the street and make it uncomfortable for other people to be around. If you look throughout the city in any kind of area where there is a shopping mall or any conglomeration of people, those people [panhandlers] exist there as well. There is a certain amount of that perception that we need to work on. That [panhandlers] is one of the things we are hoping to dissuade through Downtown Vision, Inc. We want to get some fun back in the downtown area and make sure that things are moving in the right direction. Also, a lot of the things that we are doing with the Better Jacksonville Plan will help that.
Q: What does the city need to do downtown to be revitalized?
A: The business we are in at the DDA, we really have no power. I mean we are a toothless tiger as far as the authority aspect goes. We serve really as an extension of the executive branch of the City government; we work for the Mayor John Delaney. That’s not a surprise or a complaint, it’s just the way things are. The role I see us in is as a high risk lender. If through incentives and encouragement of developers to come in and do business in downtown Jacksonville, we are able to affect someone taking the risk to build a building or doing whatever, then we have done our job. If we weren’t offering incentives for people to take that risk, then the progress timeline that we talked about, you might as well set that back another 25-30 years. The reason for that is if you have no feasibility study for downtown housing and no one lives there, then the first people going in and building are really pioneering. They need some kind of edge against what potential risk they are going to take. That’s a tricky issue. If the deals were cut and dry, slam dunk winners and look they would absolutely just flow in the face of anything, you wouldn’t need us. You wouldn’t need incentives, the deals would just happen. The controversy comes in when some people say, ‘Why would we give incentives to someone to build in the city when it’s just as easy for them to build in the suburbs?’ There are a lot of reasons for that. If the hub of the city, the downtown area, is strong, then all the elements on the exterior of the city will share in that strength and successes.
Q: What do you see happening to downtown?
A: Rather than downtown just being a business hub, I think it will be in time a cultural hub. I think it will become a residential area choice. Hopefully, we can get a university to come in, like Pittsburgh did. If you go through the city of Pittsburgh, the University of Pittsburgh is located right in the downtown area. We have a lot of areas including north of Hemming Plaza, to put maybe a law school, or an adjunct of University of Florida. I’m just thinking off the top of my head. But, that kind of project leverages other things. We are working now on the Florida Theatre, whose offices are mostly being used by the Planning Department for office space. That’s inadequate office space for them and when they move out and settle into new office space, I would love to see the Florida Theatre converted into an arts mecca. The theater would stay intact, but we would have people like performing arts, graphic arts, sculptors and painters all located in that building. Then with the proximity of that building with the Adam’s Mark Hotel and the potential new tourist business coming downtown, then you kind of have a yin and yang with the artists and creative kind of cultural in the downtown area. We could make our own little Soho.
Q: So you think the area around the Florida Theatre will be an entertainment district?
A: I think that’s a possibility. That’s one of the things that will blend with the tremendous investment that has been made in the Adam’s Mark Hotel.
Q: What do you think we are doing right downtown?
A: I think the Downtown Vision, Inc. which took a long time to get going, has been a significant plus. I think the projects that we have funded, now all of which are underway are all significant. The Shipyards is underway, 11 East Forsyth is underway and Berkman Plaza is nearing completion. I think those projects are going to change the complexion of the downtown area. The Better Jacksonville Plan, the new ball park and arena and what we’ve done at Alltel Stadium are all pretty heavyweight moves. If you look at it over a period of time just in this administration or really go back to the administration of [Mayor] Ed Austin, we’ve had a significant 12-year run at doing and in investing in the downtown area.
Q: What are we doing wrong?
A: I used to say that we don’t have enough public involvement and I really can’t say that anymore. We’ve really opened up and have had a lot of public impact. It’s not really what we are doing wrong now, it’s what we’ve done wrong in the past that has shaken people’s confidence. We’ve cracked a couple of empty safes. You and I could go over them and I could tell you the projects that were not good projects. They stand out like a sore thumb.
Q: Name one of them.
A: Well, the Skyway Express certainly hasn’t met expectations. Somebody asked me about it before and said, ‘What will you do with it?’ It’s not like a piece of exercise equipment that you buy in December and say you are going to get motivated, build muscles and lose weight and in February you are hanging your clothes on it. I mean, it exists. I think what our responsibility is now is to say OK, since it does exist, how do we utilize it? How do we reduce traffic by putting people on the Skyway? How do we park in satellite areas? How do we make it work for us and what other projects can we build to leverage the obvious inadequacies of what the system is? I mean, we have a garage of significant size on the Southbank that’s on a Skyway terminal. I don’t think anyone uses the garage. That’s obviously something that is either way ahead of its time or it’s a bad idea. My fear is that if we do other projects where the public says, ‘Well, that wasn’t well thought out or it wasn’t as smart as it needed to be or you could have done something better or use the public funds in a better way,’ then they’ll cut us off if we don’t do the right projects at the right time and serve a need. We won’t have any more projects to do, we will lose the credibility of the people who are funding it.
Q: Do you think the structure governing downtown is right or wrong?
A: Understand that because we have a consolidated government the mayor and City Council really run the whole county, so there is no specific component that runs downtown by itself. For example, Baltimore city grew because its competition was Baltimore county. It was a separate district, but you have to have a driving interest in that single area to make sure that it grows and prospers. And we don’t have that. If you are the mayor of Jacksonville, you are the mayor of downtown and the suburbs. It’s a very good system of government, but it doesn’t put the emphasis on downtown that maybe other cities, where the downtown is a separate, independent city, do. One of the previous mayors talking about downtown said, ‘I really don’t care where the growth is as long as it’s in the county, we benefit from it all over.’ That was an attitude. I can’t say I didn’t understand it — it’s a reasonable way to look at the problem — but when you talk about downtown, I think downtown needs help. We are reversing a trend that started in the early 1960s, maybe in the 1950s, which was the flight to suburbia. That was not just in Jacksonville, it happened all over the country. And now we are trying to move that back in by making downtown attractive and we are doing it by emphasis on parks and events downtown.
Q: Do you think we need to have a separate DDA?
A: Well, we used to be a separate authority, but what we found is that we were stronger by combining the DDA into the JEDC. The real interest in downtown was dwindling and there were very few business entities that would contribute to it. We have no revenue source, we don’t manage any money. Suppose we were, for example, to take over parking, which is one of the vital issues that we study in the downtown parking task force? That was a wonderful study, it really shows one of the things we need to do. You ask what we are doing wrong, we don’t have a good parking plan and it’s really split between different control points. Nobody has total control, responsibility and accountability for the parking situation in downtown Jacksonville. I wish the DDA would be able to do that because parking drives a lot of the new development and parking restricts a lot of the new development. That is an area I would like to see us do better in. Back to the DDA, without a revenue source, without real authority or teeth to make your decisions sink in or the ability to raise money through federal sources, all you are is a cheerleading body. You run around and say, ‘We want to do this and we want to do that.’ Before I was appointed to the DDA, there was a period of time when there was so little interest on the part of the community in preserving downtown that they really didn’t have much to do except open a couple restaurants here and there.
Q: Should there be a DDA?
A: I’d hate to think of what we’d do without it. Yes, I think it’s necessary. I think its role changes and I think it’s a lot more political because it is appointed by the mayor. We are as good as the people who are on the board. The staff, which is really the driver, controls a lot of the project level responsibility. The board has some very willing and dedicated members. We’ve had a history of that.
Q: Do you think Downtown Vision, Inc. has a place in Jacksonville?
A: I don’t only think they are needed, I think they are integral to the future of downtown. I think DVI executive director Terry Lorince has done a great job. She understands what is needed and her motto, which is ‘clean and safe,’ are the two things that we need to emphasize as much as anything else in our future projects. We have some issues that we have to clear up from a political, legal or administrative point of view to help her. We need to have stronger enforcement of parking lots. We need to have parking lots come under the zoning codes so they are lighted and landscaped. If you take a look at ground floors of buildings that have been taken down that we are using as parking lots, that is not a great plan. They ought to at least have some semblance of balance of looks, lighting, safety and security.
Q: What is one thing you can’t stand downtown?
A: One of my personal things that I can’t stand since I am in the real estate business are the push cart vendors. I know people love them and I applaud the entrepreneurship of the guy who’s out there cooking hot dogs. But, they are not paying rent any place and they are taking away from the retailers who are trying to make a living in the downtown area.
Q: How does the real estate community fit in with downtown redevelopment?
A: The real estate community as such really functions as what we are. We are brokers; we put buyers and sellers together. Developers create what the space will be and take the risk.
Q: What are the most difficult things commercial agents face in leasing space downtown?
A: Parking is the single biggest issue that we deal with as opposed to the suburbs where parking is not an issue. Other things we deal with are zoning codes; the downtown functions under the same restrictions as the suburban codes which is totally ridiculous. Things like storm water retention and green space area in an intensely built area, handicapped accessibility for older buildings, safety issues in older buildings, renovated buildings and Class B buildings. Those are tough issues to deal with when you are trying to restore a vibrancy to downtown.