by Sean McManus
Staff Writer
Not many people realize that the city of Jacksonville only has a population of about 750,000 people, making it the 14th largest city in the nation. It’s the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) which includes Duval, Clay, Nassau and St. Johns counties that hit a million recently, making it the 45th largest MSA in the U.S. out of about 330.
That information, in addition to being available by the U.S. Census Bureau online, comes on the authority of Ray Oldakowski, a geography professor at Jacksonville University who spends much of his time graphing, polling, measuring and charting population trends in Jacksonville and the larger MSA. Originally from Ft. Lauderdale, Oldakowski has a masters degree from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, and he and his students are responsible for much of the data city agencies use when determining how to best deal with our penchant for sprawl.
Jacksonville, it turns out, was actually behind the state average in population growth in the 1990s, growing at a rate of 16 percent as opposed to Florida’s 23 percent. Of course, as Oldakowski put it, “We were pretty big already and it’s easier to have skyrocketing growth when you’re a little smaller.”
That was the case in 120,000-person St. Johns County, which was way above the average with 50 percent growth during the same decade. Oldakowski said that these statistics help city planners know how to strike a better balance. He said that one of the reasons why Jacksonville is pushing economic growth in the Northside, in addition to the need for gentrificiation, is so that populations will spill from there north into Nassau County, where growth stood at 30 percent.
“Since companies these days can move around easily, having population growth work in tandem with economic growth will minimize driving,” he says.
In terms of traffic and infrastructure problems, Oldakowski goes easy on Jacksonville saying that although this city certainly wasn’t prepared to handle the population growth, no city really is.
“Population is a lot like water — it’s going to go somewhere,” he said. “The best we can do is try to react quickly.”
Oldakowski and his students are specialists in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and their work is similar to the processes that marketing research teams undergo when scouting out economic opportunities. Finding out where the elderly are moving determines where assisted living facilities should be built, and if affluent twentysomethings are moving in, you may want to build a high-end nightclub.
Oldakowski praised the diversified approach that the residential construction downtown. He said developers are cognizant of the fact that younger people who might only be staying 2-3 years may want to rent and not buy. In other words, they are prepared for all different kinds of growth.
Mass transit? Oldakowski said it only really works in huge cities like New York. Even the greater Washington D.C. area, praised as the model for mass transit, doesn’t even pay for itself. “If you have a very large population in a small area, sure,” he said. “But people don’t want to drive in their cars to get on a train when they can just keep going in their cars.”
He said South Florida put in a railway from West Palm Beach to Miami and people hated it. “And that’s in an area with super high density.”
New Urbanism? Oldakowski takes his students mid-state to Celebration, the planned community built by Walt Disney World where you walk to the movie theatre and the grocery store. “Neighborhoods” are designed after different parts of the country, from the row houses of Baltimore to the farm houses of Iowa. “It’s really eerie,” he said. “Even the trees are symmetrical and equidistant from each other. It’s not what life is supposed to be like.” So, he said, there’s a difference between theory and practice.
A lot of Oldakowski’s work revolves around surveys, mostly by phone but sometimes door-to-door, to find out which issues people in Jacksonville are finding most salient. Consistently, he said, Jacksonville seems to distinguish itself from other cities in Florida by how pro-business it is.
“Research shows that Jacksonville still has kind of a vague impression of itself,” said Oldakowski. “But that changed significantly with the Jaguars.”