JAX TOUR: It has a nautical inspiration to it, it and if you're... from the river, if you're pulling up by boat, you'll say, "That looks like a cruise ship." And it does.

NARR: We’re in Jacksonville, Florida, right on the St. Johns River. Across the street from the Jaguars’ stadium, a Four Seasons hotel and residences is taking shape. I’m looking up at ten stories of curved terraces, each one stepping back from the one below.

The design looks like a ship for a reason. This land used to be a shipyard. And when construction crews started digging, that history was still in the ground.

WILLIAM: They'd pull the big ships out of the river onto these big timbers right? that they would sit on while they'd work on the ships and whatnot. Well, those gantry rails Wow had to be pulled out of the site, you know.

NARR: The Four Seasons is the centerpiece of the Shipyards, alongside a new office tower, a marina and a riverfront park. But getting here took decades.

Today, this development is one piece of something bigger: about seven billion dollars in projects across downtown.

COLIN: Shipyard's a great project. Pearl Square, a great project. My goal isn't to just do projects. My goal is to rebuild a downtown.

NARR: And it’s also about reconnecting the neighborhoods around downtownit. Enter the Emerald Trail, a growing loop of trails and parks around the city’s urban core.

KAY: The last major investment in the historically Black neighborhoods was I-95 back in the '60s, which was harmful, and so if you think about the Emerald Trail, it is a major infrastructure investment in these neighborhoods. I mean, major.

NARR: I’m Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer at Fidelity National Financial, and this is Built, where commercial real estate’s leading voices share their struggles, their wins, and the lessons in between. This season, we’re meeting the people powering what’s next in our industry.

And this one’s personal. Jacksonville is where Fidelity National Financial is headquartered, and it’s been my home for over a decade. So I sat down with a few of the people changing it.

And to understand where the city is going, you have to start where it began: on the river.

COLIN: The reason for downtown's being is the river, right? That was what created the commerce and created the destination.

NARR: Colin Tarbert is the CEO of the Downtown Investment Authority, or DIA, the city agency leading the redevelopment.

COLIN: We call ourselves the gateway to Florida because, once you cross the Georgia line on I-95, the first city you get to is Jacksonville.

NARR: And it’s not just a gateway by road. It’s a gateway by sea. JAXPORT, the city’s port, handles ships from all over the world. By 2025, it was moving more than 10 million tons of cargo a year, like shipping containers and half a million cars.

According to a study commissioned by the Jacksonville Port Authority, all that activity supports well over 200,000 jobs across the state, and about $44 billion a year in economic impact.

COLIN: We're a really important location for ships and other commerce, as well as rail. CSX, which is one of the largest freight carriers and railroad companies in the United States, is headquartered here in Jacksonville.

NARR: CSX is one of a handful of Fortune 500 companies based here. And where the jobs go, people follow.

COLIN: Jacksonville as a whole has been a very hot market in terms of migration, and so the population has significantly increased across the city of Jacksonville, Duval County. In terms of downtown specifically over the last 10 years the population has almost doubled.

NARR: All that growth means a lot of building. And some of downtown’s biggest projects are going up along the waterfront. In this episode, we’re zooming in on one stretch of the north bank.

JAX TOUR Brian: Just, just for bearings, this is called One Tower?

JAX TOUR: One Tower Court

JAX TOUR Brian: Court

JAX TOUR: ... is the address and name of our office building here. So we're in the Shipyards development.

NARR: Our guide is William Michaelis, managing director at Shanna Collective, the developer behind the Shipyards.

WILLIAM: The river runs south-north but then bends roughly when you get to downtown. And so we're kind of at that bend of the river where it starts to then travel more east out to the ocean. we are really at the heart of Jacksonville right here, surrounded by great neighborhoods.

NARR: Shipbuilding here started in the 1850s, with a small yard off Bay Street, the road that runs along the river.

By the early 1900s, it had one of the biggest dry docks in the South, where crews could pull large ships out of the water for repairs. During World War II, as many as 20,000 people worked along this waterfront, building Liberty ships to carry supplies and troops overseas.

By the 1970s, Jacksonville Shipyards was the city’s largest civilian employer. But in 1992, the shipyard closed for good.

And for the next 30 years, plan after plan for this land fell through. The riverfront sat mostly empty, except on game days.

NARR: Before heading inside the hotel, William walked us out to the edge of the site, across from the stadium’s parking lots.

JAX TOUR: I grew up coming to Jaguars football games since 1995. Um, so great memories coming down to this area as a kid. Parking right over here in lot J, going to football games. You know, at the time there was a kind of a park here that it kind of fell into disrepair. but you know, a lot of the experience was you didn't really come to the downtown waterfront.

NARR: Other locals remember it the same way

Vox Pop: It was just some land. Like, it wasn't nothing you wanna be down and by and walking around.

Vox Pop: Industrial, very barren.

Vox Pop: Just, uh, empty lots. Uh, nothing really.

NARR: And even the road out front kept people away.

JAX TOUR: Bay Street was an elevated highway back in the day. Uh, about five, six years ago it was moved to at grade.

COLIN: Jacksonville is essentially a very large suburban context, which is one of the reasons why downtown needs revitalization because a lot of the investment that was concentrated in downtown has spread out as uh, the suburban growth happened a- across Duval County. But if you wanna live in a walkable, bikeable community with shopping and restaurants all accessible by foot or by bike or by scooter now it doesn't really exist.

Most of the communities are more suburban in nature. They're not as dense. It's much more car-oriented here, and that's changing. It's changing dramatically, not just in downtown, but throughout other communities that want to see additional pedestrian infrastructure.

NARR: Even after doubling, downtown’s population is still small.

COLIN: In terms of total residents we are just sort of getting to the 10,000 mark.

So 10,000 residents in downtown, which is, you know, before I got here, that was always this mark of success. It's a four-square-mile area, so for me, it should probably be 30,000 or 40,000 people um, to give you a sense of where I hope we get to in the next 10, 20 years.

NARR: Colin's focus is downtown. But the neighborhoods around it have their own story.

KAY: The Emerald Trail will be, I think it's, we say 30 miles, but I think it's gonna be 34 miles of a trail and linear park system that connects 14 neighborhoods that surround downtown, and then to downtown and the river.

NARR: Kay Ehas runs Groundwork Jacksonville, a nonprofit that cleans up polluted land and brings urban creeks back to life. They're also working with the city to build the Emerald Trail.

KAY: One of the things I love about it is that it connects more well-to-do with less well-to-do neighborhoods, vice versa. So when we take people on tours, they'll say, "Oh my God, I've never seen this part of Jacksonville." So it's gonna really bring people to appreciate historic African American neighborhoods that have been neglected for decades. The only major infrastructure that's happened is highways. In the '60s, the highways decimated a lot of those neighborhoods, disconnected them. So the trail is really reconnecting all of those neighborhoods.

NARR: Around the same time the highways went in, Jacksonville merged its government with the rest of Duval County. Locals call it consolidation.

KAY: A lot of these were their own towns, and then Jacksonville would absorb them over the years. And then consolidation happened in the 1960s, and promises were made that were never kept, and that's why there's so much distrust.

NARR: People here learned not to get their hopes up. We found Matt, who has lived in Jacksonville for over 50 years and worked in downtown for 25.

Vox Pop: Unfortunately, for as long as I've been living here, it's always seemed like downtown is 10 years away. I think we're starting to finally do it, but it's still a work in progress.

NARR: That progress is bolstered by people who were ready to bet big on this city. One of them you might have seen on the sidelines at an NFL game, or in the business news.

He's the team owner with the big mustache, curled up at the ends.

KHAN video[1] [2] : It was my dream to own an NFL team. The day I became an owner was the day I made a promise to myself. I was going to do everything in my power to build a winning franchise. I'm so passionate about this team, about what we can do together, and I know our fans share that passion. I'm Jaguars owner Shad Khan, and I'm all in.

NARR: That’s from a TV ad the team ran in 2012, his first year as owner.

WILLIAM: Many people know the story of Shad Khan. But, you know, immigrating to America, graduating from University of Illinois, eventually building Flex-N-Gate into the company it is today, which is one of the largest automotive parts companies, privately held automotive parts companies in the world.

Just the quintessential, you know, American Dream kind of success story.

NARR: He bought the team in a deal worth about 770 million dollars. Born in Pakistan, he became the first person of color to own an NFL team. And for him, “all in” has come to mean a lot more than football.

WILLIAM: I think it's fair to say that the Khan family has really fallen in love with Jacksonville since that time. I think that's clear from the investments that the Khan family have made in this community.

NARR: But it's not only love. Jacksonville is one of the smallest TV markets in the NFL. So for Shad, the team's future and the city's are tied together. When he first presented his plans for the Shipyards in 2015, he put it this way: "The Jaguars can't do well if Jacksonville doesn't do well."

And it works the other way, too. Downtown has leaned on game days for a long time.

Vox Pop: You know, having the Jags here is, is, is definitely a plus for us, but it is a lot of feast and famine m- for the businesses down here.

NARR: Jay Murphy is a Jacksonville local.

Vox Pop: When the Jags are here, they can't keep up. When the Jags aren't here, they don't need the employees. So it's, it's kinda hard to plan around that all the time.

NARR: Shad wanted to change that, and make downtown, in his words, "the place to be every day of the year."

WILLIAM: I think the through line is to dream big. It's to have, boundless expectations and to believe that you can accomplish what other people think can't be done.

NARR: Today, the family’s real estate projects here are led by Shad’s daughter, Shanna.

WILLIAM: Shanna has really taken a leadership role in these projects. She has other real estate projects in Chicago and elsewhere.

And so she had been leading this effort in Jacksonville for a number of years. And it made sense to, to bring sort of the collective real estate efforts and endeavors that Shanna has under one roof, that is Shanna Collective.

NARR: The Kahn family also had a previous connection with the Four Seasons.

WILLIAM: It's the power of the Khan family, frankly. I the, the Khan family owns the flagship Four Seasons in Toronto, and now they have a great relationship with Four Seasons. And so when the development project came up on this amazing, piece of land in Jacksonville in, in the Khan family's mind, it was gonna be a Four Seasons.

a lot of people didn't believe it. A lot of people still don't believe it, frankly. But it's happening.

NARR: Believing in a Four Seasons was one thing. Paying for one was another.

WILLIAM: One of the more simple, to some extent, component of it is the fact that this land was city-owned property that was not on the tax rolls before development.

And so f-- like this project and many other projects in downtown Jacksonville at this point in time the deal doesn't pencil without some degree of assistance from the city of Jacksonville.

NARR: The land came with one more complication. Part of the site had been a city park, and it carried a state requirement to stay a park. In 2022, the state agreed to move that requirement west, to a future park called Shipyards West. That cleared the riverfront for the hotel.

Any public money for a downtown project like this one goes through the DIA. Once a project fits the city’s plan, Colin says the next question is whether City money is needed at all.

COLIN: In economic development terms, we call that the but for analysis. But for a public investment, this project will or will not happen. And so we need to make the case that this project actually does need a subsidy in order to make the numbers work. The developer's not just asking for something, so that the, they can benefit from it.

NARR: The most common kind of help in Jacksonville is a tax rebate. William explains….

WILLIAM: So the largest form of assistance that is typical in Jacksonville are what's called REV grants, recaptured enhanced value grants, which is basically you take a portion of the added tax value that the projects create, and you rebate that back to the developer.

The big plus side of that is the land generated no taxes to begin with, so the city wins because now we've developed it, they're getting tax money, and we're just not paying as big of a tax bill.

NARR: In 2023, City Council approved an incentive package of about 130 million dollars for the hotel, the condos, the office building and the city's marina. It includes those tax rebates over 20 years, and a cash completion grant of about 26 million dollars, paid only once the whole project is finished.

For the city, there's one more test.

COLIN: we call that our return on investment, our ROI. And so if projects like the Four Seasons, we wanna make sure that we have an investment return of at least one, right? We're putting in $1, we're at least getting a dollar back. In most cases, and certainly for the Four Seasons, you're gonna see an ROI of, much higher than a one because of the jobs you're creating and the hotel taxes you're creating, the real estate taxes that you're creating.

NARR: So the city takes on part of the risk, but only if the project can show it pays the public back.

WILLIAM: So we'd have broken ground uh, in 2022. Being a shipyard, before this was an actual working shipyard, the subterranean conditions were not good. So a lot of soil remediation had to happen. A lot of subterranean structure to make sure that, the building will be there forever.

And so, uh, developers will talk about, you know, basically that until you get out of the ground is the scariest part of the project, and this one, this one definitely was that.

NARR: The building topped out in August 2025. Then, this past February, the developers closed a 360-million-dollar construction loan from Goldman Sachs, the largest ever for a private development in Jacksonville.

When we visited, the hotel was still about a year from opening. We started at the bottom of the ramp, off Bay Street.

JAX TOUR: So we, we're standing right here, uh, on Bay Street at the arrival ramp to go up to the Four Seasons Hotel and Residences Jacksonville at the Shipyards Project.

Uh, the, the hotel is 170 rooms, has three, uh, uh, food and beverage outlets, uh, a lobby bar, um, all-day dining on the waterfront, as well as a signature restaurant on the rooftop. And then there's also 26 condo residences, uh, in the other wing.

NARR: The building was designed by the architecture firms ODA and HKS, with interiors shaped by Shad’s daughter, Shanna Khan, herself. PCL Construction is building it.

On the way up, William points out something unusual about the design.

JAX TOUR: Most hotel condominium projects are stacked, right? So it's a rectangle, just think of it, and you've got the hotel or the condos on the bottom. You know, the first 10 floors or whatever will be condos, and the next 10 floors will be hotel, or vice versa.

Uh, this building's actually a V. So the east side of the V, is the hotel, and the west side of the V are the condos, and then they connect via some amenity spaces kind of in the back of the V. But it creates a really unique experience where you can have what's really a resort style hotel in an urban setting.

NARR: It's also built for a riverfront and rising water levels.

JAX TOUR: We're actually up, you know, 20-plus feet here at, at the ground floor, entrance to the hotel with parking underneath us, for resiliency and for other reasons.

NARR: Inside, the lobby is full of scissor lifts.

JAX TOUR: So right now, uh, this lobby, one of the statement features of this lobby that you walk into, it's an extremely large hotel lobby, are these, uh, architectural columns that flare out, You know, in this way that just creates this, this optical illusion for all those around you.

NARR: I counted 14 columns surrounding the space…

JAX TOUR Brian: so we're talking about these massive pillars in this open environment, which I'm assuming that when the plastic comes off the glass to our east-

JAX TOUR: You'll walk in and you'll see straight out to the river

to the river. Yeah.

JAX TOUR Brian: Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

JAX TOUR: And the lobby bar is gonna be sat, sat between these two of those more central columns. This stunning, stunning, uh, lobby bar.

NARR: Out back, the all-day restaurant sits almost on the water.

JAX TOUR: Yeah, it's like when the, coverings aren't on the glass, you feel like you're floating out on top of the river. Right. It's unbelievable.

NARR: Up on the fourth floor, there's one hotel room that's further along than the rest. William calls it the control room. And it has a twin.

JAX TOUR: We do a model room, and so we have in an u- unnamed warehouse location in Jacksonville a completed hotel room, terrace and all.

Wow. Um, you can walk into it and, and take a nap if you want. And then we get to go in as an ownership team and as the brand in Four Seasons and, uh, you know, give comments, give adjustments.

"Hey, this actually, this looked great on paper but didn't work that well in reality," right? And so let's, let's get that practice, get those refinements in. Um, so that, 170 of them get done, uh, on repeat, it's, uh, it's the product we all are expecting.

NARR: In this hotel, a mistake could get built 170 times.

Ten floors up, the rooftop restaurant looks out over a reminder of what this place used to be.

JAX TOUR: you've been talking about the shipyards, right? You can see some of the working shipyards off in the distance.

JAX TOUR Brian: You've got more than 180 degrees of river in front of you.

JAX TOUR: Yep.

JAX TOUR Brian: And you can see from where I'm standing facing Bishop Kenny High School, you've got four bridges in view.

NARR: And that view isn't just for hotel guests.

WILLIAM: Anybody can book a spa appointment. Anybody can come eat at one of the restaurants. or the lobby bar. you know, Really a desire for that to, function like a living room, for people in Jacksonville and in downtown.

NARR:  The hotel and residences are set to open in 2027. But parts of the Shipyards are already up and running. The office tower was finished in February, and the Jaguars’ business staff now fill three floors. And down below the hotel, boats are tying up at the marina.

JAX TOUR:  Met Park Marina, it is a public transient marina. It was not in good repair. Um, as part of this overall development project and public private partnership, we redeveloped this on behalf of the city, and now we manage it on behalf of the city as well. 78-slip public marina. Uh, we've added fuel to it.

NARR:    The marina was relaunched in August, along with a new building right next to the docks. Under one roof, there’s a marina office, a ship store and a restaurant called Asado Life. Asado Life’s first location was recently recommended by the Michelin Guide.

JAX TOUR: We had a friend in town this past weekend who, uh, is born and raised here, also grew up on the water. But she doesn't live here anymore. She's up- Right ... near, near Atlanta, and she was in town. And we said, "Hey, let's hop on the boat, and let's go park at this marina, eat lunch at Esau. They're like, "Wait, we can do this?"

Vox Pop: This matters for Jacksonville because it gives a destination to people on the water.

NARR: Andrew Hawkins is the marina's general manager.

Vox Pop: that is the biggest feedback we receive here is that nobody ever had a, a reason to come down here besides for football games, and now every single weekend we're filling the docks with boats.

NARR: The Shipyards is bringing people to the riverfront by boat and by car. Kay Ehas wants to bring neighbors there on foot.

The idea behind the Emerald Trail isn't new. About a century ago, Jacksonville architect Henry Klutho imagined what he called an Emerald Necklace: a ring of parks and green space around downtown. Groundwork is building its own version.

KAY: we believe beauty matters as much as function. That's what makes people care about their neighborhood. And so the goal is to add a boatload of shade trees. It's hot here. We need to be greening up the urban core to add green infrastructure where we have room to help with stormwater runoff, clean it before it gets into the aquifer.

We want it to also be a thirty-mile art gallery, and the art is determined by the folks that live in the neighborhoods so that it's how do they wanna tell their story about their history and their culture.

NARR: When it’s done, the trail will meet the river in four places. One of them is a new park the city is planning right next to the Shipyards.

The first stretch of the trail opened in 2024: just over a mile through LaVilla, one of the city’s historic Black neighborhoods. But Kay’s favorite part of the project is the creeks.

KAY: We're restoring two creeks as part of that, that were channelized and hardened in the 1920s that have been the city's number one and two flooding priorities for decades. We are turning them back to natural streams as much as possible, given the land constraints in an urban environment.

NARR: One of them, Hogan’s Creek, meets the river right where that new park will be. The other, McCoy’s Creek, is across downtown to the west, and a mile of it has already been restored.

KAY: it's absolutely beautiful. The restoration is absolutely beautiful.

BRIAN: Is it 'cause there are trees? It's 'cause there's grass? It's

KAY: It's a meandering creek. Like the first time I came up and the meanders were in place, I'm like, "It's making my heart sing."

So it's, in one part, there's three fish nurseries, so the mamas can have their babies, and the babies can stay in there and not get eaten until they're old enough.

So the former public works director, they just cared about flooding. We cared about nature, fish and wildlife habitat, recreational, like all those things. And he would always say, "I don't care about the green stuff. I don't care about the fish." But it's gonna be a smorgasbord for fish.

And a spawning area for the river fish, right? People wanna be able to fish again.

A lot of them grew up when it was more of a natural creek and they could play in it. They want that again. They want that for their grandkids.

NARR: For decades, a regular rainstorm was enough to flood the streets around McCoy’s Creek. Since the restoration, that’s happening a lot less. The engineers on the project say nuisance flooding has dropped dramatically, and about 50 homes are no longer in the federal flood zone. It’s not a perfect fix. When heavy rains hit this October, some nearby streets still flooded, but people who work in the area said it wasn’t as bad as before.

NARR: Back downtown, some locals would like to see even more than a hotel and a new marina. Not everyone thinks a hotel, marina and football are enough. Here's Jay Murphy again.

Vox Pop: I'm really hoping that they expand on it though, because we definitely need the tourism, and just having the Jags in as a tourist attraction, I don't think is enough. We need, we need something that's a draw every day of the week.

NARR: Colin has noticed the same thing. When he first visited the site, he saw how far it sits from the rest of downtown.

COLIN: it's a little further out, so it's stadium District isn't necessarily the most walkable from the downtown core. And so, I think in some ways it, it feels a little bit removed. The flip side of that is I think it's gonna be so catalytic to connecting people to the sports and entertainment district, giving them a reason to go there not just for a, a game or a major event, a couple times a year but, basically driving traffic there on an everyday basis now between the marina and the new restaurant, Asado Life, that's opened. People are going there in a way that they never have before.

NARR: And a lot more is on the way. Colin is quick to credit the people who ran the Downtown Investment Authority before him for much of it.

COLIN: We've completed over $2.5 billion of construction.

There's another two and a half, $3 billion under construction right now with more in the pipeline. And so now the fruit of their labors is literally rising out of the ground, and there's so much excitement about the momentum for a lot of people, they don't understand kind of the plans, right? They don't understand necessarily the renderings that they see. But when they see a building and they see concrete and they see steel and they see restaurants opening and businesses moving in, residents moving in, they, then they get it.

NARR: In another area of downtown, the developer Gateway Jax is rebuilding more than 20 blocks, starting with a district called Pearl Square.

They've got, I think, five to six projects under construction right now, including multifamily, including retail, including a hotel. And so that'll really be the, the downtown neighborhood, is the way I see it. If you wanna live in Jacksonville and you wanna live in a fun, place that's emerging and exciting and you wanna walk to work and you wanna walk to the grocery store, Pearl Square is gonna be your, urban neighborhood.

In LaVilla, the University of Florida opened its first graduate campus in Jacksonville this fall, with a semiconductor research institute on the way. And by the river, the Culinary Institute of America is planning a new hub for the Southeast.

COLIN: Their location in San Antonio is maybe the most analogous to what we want to see here and what they want to do in Jacksonville, which really sparked a whole new culinary scene in downtown San Antonio, which didn't exist before.

NARR: If that sounds familiar, it should. Last season on Built, we visited Pearl in San Antonio, where the CIA’s campus is part of the district.

Back in Jacksonville, right across Bay Street from the Four Seasons, the Jaguars’ stadium is being rebuilt. It’s set to reopen in 2028. From the hotel rooftop[3] [4] [5] [6] , William pointed out one change any fan here will feel.

JAX TOUR: A new feature is they have cut out the corners of the stadium- Okay ... for the Stadium of the Future to increase airflow, uh, into the bowl. So if you've been to a Jags game, you know- Right ... uh, that you can be tailgating and it's 80 degrees.

Right. You're like, "This feels pretty moderate. There's a little light breeze off the river, and it's October." And then you go into the stadium bowl and there's no wind, and the sun's straight over your head and you're like, "How is it 98 degrees in here?" This changes that. Okay. Uh, it allows airflow to come into the stadium.

NARR: The stadium is a separate project from the Shipyards, a deal between the city and Shad’s team, the Jaguars. It’s budgeted at 1.4 billion dollars. The team and the city each put 625 million toward construction, and the city is adding another 150 million for repairs and upgrades. If it ends up costing more, the team pays the extra. And Colin says the plan is bigger than football.

COLIN: The goal there is to really build a mixed-use community and neighborhood around the stadium of the future. Right now it's primarily surrounded by parking lots. So we wanna see those parking lots turn into vertical development with residents and retail and destination.

NARR: And the stadium deal came with something else.

WILLIAM: through the community benefits agreement associated with the Stadium of the Future, which is the largest community benefits agreement in NFL history, which includes $150 million from the Khan family over 30 years towards the betterment of Jacksonville.

NARR: Here’s how that works. Alongside the stadium deal, the team and the city also agreed to put money into the community. The money is for the riverfront parks, affordable housing, job training and to help people experiencing homelessness, including on the Eastside, the neighborhood right next to the stadium.

NARR: The Emerald Trail has a long way to go. Kay says about half of it is built, under construction or in design. And building it here is harder than in other cities.

KAY: So re-remember when Visit Jacksonville came out for a very short period of time with this tagline about it's easier here, which I thought was crazy.

It's harder. And the reason it's harder is, number one, our trail is very urban. Like the Miami Underline, it's underneath a transit system. They have their space. The Atlanta BeltLine Railroad, they had their space. We're having to create space as we go as much as we can.

The other thing is that Jacksonville doesn't have major foundations.

NARR: Kay points to Atlanta and Houston. In Atlanta, a foundation built on a Coca-Cola fortune gave the BeltLine 80 million dollars. In Houston, a single family foundation gave 50 million to that city’s bayou trails.

Kay’s next goal is about 15 million dollars to finish designing the rest of the trail, so every segment is ready to compete for construction money. She’s heard the doubts before.

KAY: People think Jacksonville doesn't ever get anything done. It- there's a plan that just sit on the shelves. And so I knew that going into this job, so we did an implementation plan. was 10 years, we're supposed to be done in 2029. We had to convince people that it was really gonna happen, and I think some people, the feedback I'm getting right now is people still don't think it's gonna happen.

But it's going to happen. There isn't any if, ands or buts about it.

NARR: But bringing new parks and new money into old neighborhoods raises a hard question. Who gets to stay?

KAY: our biggest challenge is that we want long-term residents and small businesses to remain and prosper as part of what we're doing. But green projects lead to gentrification, so how do you do that? So we've started home repair programs because if you can keep people in their homes you repair them so they wanna stay there and live there, and we partner with United Way.

But it's based in the neighborhood, so there's a case manager from the neighborhood, there's a construction manager.

NARR: In five neighborhoods, Groundwork has started handing the planning over to the people who live there.

KAY: The approach is that residents and small businesses should be the architects of their revitalization.

So come from within. So, we are training three leaders from each neighborhood on, they're going through a leadership academy on the planning process, how to do implementation, where do you look for money meeting the city folks they're gonna have to deal with to get a plan implemented, all that kind of stuff.

That, and we're paying them for their time, and then we're doing a steering committee in each neighborhood, that will work with our urban planning consultants to then develop the plan. So it's their plan. It's what they wanna see in their neighborhood.

NARR: William hears a different worry: that Jacksonville doesn't need to change at all.

WILLIAM: there's people who say, "Jacksonville doesn't need to change," right? We don't need other people. We don't need a Four Seasons. We don't need this stuff coming in here.

But it's highlighting what Jacksonville has. It can be both and, right? We can still have quirky, cool neighborhoods. We can still have historic neighborhoods, and we can have an amazing downtown that bring great businesses to Jacksonville, that bring great talent to Jacksonville, that make more people fall in love with everything Jacksonville has to offer, not just downtown.

JAX TOUR Brian: Do you think that you'll recognize downtown in three years?

JAX TOUR: Absolutely not. And then, then again, three years after that, you won't recognize it again. Yeah. That's the pace of change that is happening in downtown Jacksonville.

NARR: Colin thinks most people won't even remember what it took.

COLIN: people have really short memories, so people will forget that The Four Seasons didn't exist, in 2028 they'll say, "Well, it was always been there, right?" And you're like, "No it's, it's new.

I think in 20 years, hopefully the generation that is leading then looks back and says, "Hey, they powered through, tough economics and here we are. What are we gonna do for the next generation?"

NARR: For William, who grew up going to games in the parking lot across the street, it's personal.

JAX TOUR: You know, I almost have goose-bumps, like, thinking about it. You know, I feel so proud, you know, to be, to be able to be a part of something like this and, and what it means. A- and I feel the weight of it and, and humbled by, by it as well.

NARR: You can see photos from our visit to the Shipyards at builtpodcast.com.

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode was produced by Sandra Lopez Monsalve. Our location producer in Jacksonville is Dustin Tuccillo. Our editor is Genevieve Sponsler. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Special thanks to our guests, and to Linzee Ott, Sean Neary, Christine Broad, and to the people that talked to us around the Shipyards: Andrew Hawkins, Caroline Salmon, Brandon McClain, Matt Kachurgus, Jay Murphy, Cindy Westbrook and Larry Baxter.

I’m Brian Maughan.  Thanks for listening to BUILT—where we explore forward-thinking developments in distinct markets, reshaping our BUILT world.