It’s time for Tallahassee to grow up | Opinion

Paul Bradshaw | Your Turn

Imagine an alternative history for Tallahassee, one where a modern skyline of a dozen or more 20-story buildings boldly defines the urban core in the historic city center; a skyline that projects the power, optimism and sophistication of being the capital of the nation’s third most populous state.

It would be a place where people would live, work, shop and play within a vibrant, walkable downtown. Located near FSU and FAMU, our alternative Tallahassee could be the Austin or Portland of the 21st century, an aspirational home for the creative class that would propel Tallahassee’s economy.

Unfortunately that idealized Tallahassee doesn’t exist. And there are land use decisions now being made that take us further from that future.

To fully understand, you have to go back decades to the Martinez administration and the origins of Southwood. St. Joe Company — which had previously been a sleepy landowner holding vast tracts of timber and grazing land — decided it wanted to take a more aggressive role as a developer, including on its land near Capital Circle SE.

But it had one problem. With Tallahassee’s government-dominated city center more than five miles away, there was little incentive for state workers to live in that area. St. Joe had an inspired (if self-serving) idea: Instead of asking workers to travel to the Capitol complex every day, essentially move the Capitol complex to St. Joe’s cow pastures.

As you might imagine, this idea received significant opposition, especially by Tom Pelham, then Secretary of the Department of Community Affairs. Pelham saw St. Joe’s proposal as a textbook case of urban sprawl, where the conversion of those pastures to homes and squat office buildings was a prescription for long daily commutes, expensive infrastructure funded by local taxpayers, and evisceration of Tallahassee’s historic city center that was just beginning to shed its image of urban blight.

The resistance to this plan went away when subsequent governors were in power, for what was essentially a rube’s bargain: a couple of hundred acres of free pasture and woods in exchange for the state of Florida's future office growth.

St. Joe got its anchor tenant and Tallahassee lost the full potential of revitalizing its downtown. It was quite possibly the worst planning decision in the history of Tallahassee.

Had we retained all those state workers to form a critical mass in a compact urban footprint, we would have a good shot at attaining the oft-stated goal of Tallahassee’s elected officials, creating an 18-hour downtown that includes a thriving variety of shops and fully occupied condominiums.

But without that critical mass, you have what we see as our stark reality: two aging state office buildings that are taller than five stories, restaurants that struggle to survive, condominiums that have stood half empty for a decade, and a disconnected civic fabric that geographically isolates state workers from the broader community.

If Tallahassee is serious about revitalizing its downtown and creating a vibrant mix of land uses that provides opportunities for working, shopping and living within a walkable area, the city needs to partner with the state and recommit to growing up instead of growing out.

Paul Bradshaw was the director of Florida’s Division of State Planning and is a developer in Tallahassee.