Jacksonville is booming, but that doesn’t mean you’d want to live there

We just came back from a family vacation to Amelia Island. We wanted to check out Jacksonville, but when we started to do research on it, we were underwhelmed by the things to do. There was the Catty Shack, a refuge for lions; the Cummer Museum; and Riverside Arts flea market. Then a lot of the things to do were actually at the beach and not in the city.

I had spent some time on Zillow and was surprised to see that the real estate wasn’t cheap at all. The Five Points neighborhood caught my eye as an urban neighborhood, but I was again surprised to see that houses cost from $600,000 to $1.5 million. Really?

We drove around on a Saturday morning, which granted is rarely the busiest time in any city, but the downtown was sort of the ghost town you’d imagine with the homeless and hobos the only ones on the street. Then we drove through Brooklyn — is that really the name of this neighborhood? And over to Five Points where there was a pint-sized commercial corridor and a cute park, but not enough in my mind to merit the prices.

There seems to be a lot of other cheaper real estate farther afield.