The Downtown Investment Authority (DIA) is close to hiring its first CEO as well as a firm to develop its Community Redevelopment Area (CRA) Plan. This early stage is the ideal time to identify and quantify possible benchmarks by which the DIA could measure its effectiveness at improving Downtown Jacksonville.
We reached out to our partners at NAIOP and asked them to help us develop the criteria that we should use to benchmark the growth of Downtown moving forward. These benchmarks, supported by JCCI as part of the Jax2025 findings, include: increasing the taxable value of Downtown, decreasing the number of vacant buildings, increasing the number of people living and working Downtown, decreasing retail vacancies, adding more sidewalk cafes, and increasing the number of visitors to Downtown. While the categories may not surprise you, what may is how some of these statistics vary by area of Downtown, from the Northbank to the Southbank to Brooklyn and LaVilla.
Our hope is the DIA will use our report to help them benchmark their success moving forward and also to use this information to target future incentives as part of the CRA Plan. DVI intends to update this information on an annual basis.
-A message from the Executive Director, Terry Lorince
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