Jacksonville has always felt a little strange to me as a city.
We’re big. Really big. Geographically, Jacksonville is enormous. That size brings with it a lot of genuinely big-city problems. We have traffic. We have crime. We have sprawl. We have neighborhoods and communities with vastly different needs, priorities and personalities.
And yet, in some ways, Jacksonville still feels like the country’s biggest small town.
The Westside has its own identity. The Northside has another. Mandarin feels completely different from either of them, and none of those areas are much like the Beaches. Riverside and San Marco have developed their own personalities. Then there are all the areas in between, each with different concerns and different political interests.
In that way, Jacksonville can feel a little like the country itself: one big place made up of a lot of smaller places that don’t always want the same things.
Maybe that helps explain why we’ve struggled for so long to develop a true civic identity.
For a city this large, our downtown can feel surprisingly empty. We have buses that few people seem excited to ride and a people mover that feels more like an interesting leftover than the backbone of a transportation system. Downtown has some attractions, some restaurants and some promising development, but it has never really become the sort of place where people say, “Let’s go downtown tonight and see what’s happening.”
That’s what I would change.
If I could instantly improve Jacksonville, I’d give us a downtown entertainment district that people actually wanted to visit.
We’re already investing heavily in a new stadium, and I’m excited about what that could mean for the Jaguars and for the city. But I keep coming back to one question: when people leave a game, what are they walking into?
When Atlanta moved the Braves from Turner Field to Truist Park, the stadium wasn’t built as an isolated destination. The Battery grew up around it, creating restaurants, entertainment, shopping and gathering places that gave people a reason to arrive early, stay late or visit even when there wasn’t a game.
Jacksonville doesn’t need to copy Atlanta, but we could certainly learn something from the idea.
Right now, our biggest concentration of shopping and restaurants seems to be around Town Center. There’s plenty there, but very little of it feels like entertainment. You can eat. You can shop. You can play Top Golf. Mostly, though, you can sit in traffic and wonder why you decided to go there in December.
River City Marketplace seems to be following a similar pattern on the Northside. Build more restaurants. Build more stores. Add more parking lots.
But people don’t just want places to spend money. They want places to spend time.
They want live music. Movies. Bowling. Games. Comedy. Outdoor spaces. Restaurants that turn into an evening rather than just a meal. Places where you can take your family, meet friends, celebrate something or simply decide at the last minute that you want to get out of the house and do something.
That’s what Jacksonville is missing.
I don’t think downtown needs to replace the Beaches, Riverside, San Marco, Mandarin or any of the other communities that already have their own character. Jacksonville may simply be too spread out ever to revolve around one central district the way some cities do.
But every city deserves a heart.
Jacksonville has gotten pretty good at building places where people can eat and shop. Maybe it’s time we built someplace where they can make memories.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
