by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
“Downtown real estate is hot.”
That’s Mike Saylor’s take on what certainly seems to be a booming apartment and condominium tower market in Downtown Jacksonville. Toss is half-million dollar new and renovated homes in Springfield and Downtown is rapidly becoming a market not just in demand, but one that’s seeing average prices skyrocketing from where they were just five years ago.
Saylor is the City’s Director of Planning and Development and said while the planning stage is certainly necessary and an integral part of his job, he really appreciates seeing projects come to fruition.
“There is a lot of talk about the condominium market Downtown. I don’t really get excited looking at deals until I see the engineering plans,” he said. “I deal a lot right now with architects and artists’ renderings of things that are being talked about Downtown. I have 30 or so projects on my list. If one or two of them come through, we will have a couple more thousand residential units in the inventory.
“But, there are 30 projects out there that have been identified that would bring 12,000-14,000 residential units on the river Downtown. I’m a little suspect of all that coming online any time soon.”
Though he’s only been on the job for seven months, Saylor has many years of experience in development and consulting in Jacksonville as the owner of BHR Engineering for the past 30 years.
“We specialized not really in municipal planning and zoning issues, but in big projects,” he said. “We were the land planners and engineers of record for big projects like the Riverwalk, Alltel Stadium and the baseball park. I’m really more of a project person on the commercial side, but last October, I got a call from the Mayor’s office. I was traveling and they called late on a Friday night in my hotel room.
“Susie Wiles (communications director for Mayor John Peyton) said that Jeannie Fewell, director of planning and development for the City, had resigned and they needed some help.
“I told her I’d look into my database and give her some names of people they might want to talk to and she said they really didn’t want to talk to anyone, they wanted me. I reminded her that I had a job, owned a company and really couldn’t extricate myself that easily.”
Peyton must have wanted Saylor badly because Wiles — knowing Saylor’s status — gave him about 48 hours to make a decision. Saylor realized the merger of his company with a larger firm was going to be a formidable change and decided Peyton’s offer sounded too good to pass on.
In addition to helping plan the residential rebirth of Jacksonville, Saylor must also focus on the entire city and the many developers looking all over town.
“I spend most of my time talking to prospects who are coming to Jacksonville, trying to understand the lay of the land and want to hook up with a commercial realtor, land use attorney, engineer or architect planner to explore the opportunities to make a very big margin in Jacksonville because the dirt is so cheap,” he said. “Most of them are looking at the Northside. About 80 percent of the action we are seeing in planning and development is in Council District 11 (North and West Jacksonville.)
“What my department does is recommendation for approval, denial or a request for modifications to a development proposal.”
Saylor said another major issue facing Jacksonville is affordable, or workforce, housing. Many of the condominium conversions and new towers have displaced renters. Saylor said he “horse trades” with developers to get them to modify their projects to help the affordable housing issue.
“I horse traded the other day with a developer who wanted to build townhomes,” he said. “I convinced him that he probably ought to think about building rental garden apartments more on the workforce affordable price point and gave him an incentive for doing that.”
Almost immediately after joining the City, Saylor was greeted with the news that the U.S. Navy wanted to close Oceana Naval Station in Virginia and reopen Cecil Field as a master jet base. The local public outcry against reopening Cecil — which had been converted into Cecil Commerce Center — caused a public relation’s nightmare for the mayor’s office and presented Saylor with a major issue.
“It was one of those things we were not expecting,” he said. “The city spent a lot of money, as you well know, improving and modernizing the infrastructure to make it ready for private sector development.”
There’s still talk of Cecil being reopened, but Peyton is firmly on the record in opposition.
“Don’t look for Cecil Field to be converting back to Navy use unless something incredibly extraordinary happens in the next several months,” said Saylor.