by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Urban redesign specialist McCormack Baron Salazar will guide the redevelopment of Jacksonville’s struggling Brooklyn neighborhood.
The City picked the St. Louis firm to take its blueprint for Brooklyn from the drawing board to reality. The City wants to use affordable housing to jump start the neighborhood. That’s an MBS specialty. The firm has designed communities around workforce housing in urban areas across the country, including Richmond, Va., Atlanta and Ft. Worth, Texas.
“Our specific focus in Brooklyn is going to be mixed-use housing,” said Ron Barton, the executive director of the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission. “We’ve retained the McCormack Baron group and we should see that effort kick off somewhere around the end of the month.”
Barton wants to proceed quickly in Brooklyn before rising interest rates hurt the affordable housing market. As rates continue to climb, mortgages become more expensive for the lower-income demographic that the City hopes will take root in Brooklyn.
“We want to execute on that property while the market is ripe,” said Barton. “The low interest rate-environment provides the maximum amount of consumers for those kinds of development.”
The timetable is pressing enough that the City will be willing to provide incentives for desirable low-cost developments, said Barton. High-end developers, on the other hand, will find it far more difficult to pry loose City dollars, he said.
By establishing low-cost housing in Brooklyn and the adjacent LaVilla neighborhood, the City hopes to balance a downtown residential market that leans heavily toward the luxury end. A well-rounded market in downtown will spur demand for retail and service-oriented development, the thinking goes.
It’s a formula that’s worked well for MBS. Its Quality Hill project in Kansas City and Centennial Place in Atlanta are among dozens of examples of urban designs based on mixed-income housing listed on the firm’s Web site.
MBS will be working from a design by Pittsburgh firm Urban Design Associates. The plan envisions mixed-use housing surrounded by retail, parks and ponds. The greenspace would create a walkable environment, connecting the neighborhood to the river and to the thriving Riverside Avenue commercial district.