^The city isn't looking to sell off the property wholesale now that they own it. That part of it is good, the city should be a partner in whatever happens and there should be public space on the property, at least including the piers and riverwalk. Unfortunately there isn't any plan at all right now.
Absolutely not unless you want the city to be liable for the remediation. The City needs to sell it relatively quickly.
To your point though, the land has no value. The land is development land only, right? So that implies one, two or all of three things:
1) New development (i.e. replacement cost) is attractive compared to buying existing inventory. We know this not to be the case.
2) There is demand for new development. We know this also not to be the case or we would have seen more activity a la 220 Riverside around DT (and we don't want rentals on this land if we're talking highest and best use). Obviously there is no demand for more hotel rooms or office space right now, and nobody is going to or able to do condos in the Jax market at this point (and I don't think that high rise condos are highest and best public use for such potentially publicly useful land, and low-mid-rise condos will have to be built and sold for a starting face rate higher than than market can come close to bearing and in a time frame that's not afforded such a small market with few comps).
3) There is a well-capitalized buyer pool with pockets to put this development land in. My exposure to the private equity side of real estate leads me to believe that nobody really has a fund (or pocket) to put this land in. The market's not right, the partner pool is equally limited and many groups can't or don't partner, the timing to buy is not right nor is the investment horizon right for 99% of funds out there, etc etc. Even opportunity funds nowadays are simply chasing value-add or development deals in core markets, maybe strong secondary markets.
Shipyards is simply a very large and risky land play in a very risky tertiary market. Almost nobody can do this deal. Nobody local can - that's already been proven twice (Jax has very few local developers of any sort of caliber, and the quality local guys are quite small, i.e. Hallmark).
So at most I would think the city can either sell the whole thing for dirt cheap to a small guy looking for a hold opportunity in the hopes that someday in the future there is a well capitalized group that can come in and take it down, or he can break it up and sell it (would be difficult if city wants the kind of control it should have over such a sight, and the city doesn't have the proper planning procedures in place to guide such piecemeal development).
But I think the city is basically looking at giving away the land to Khan or tiny portions next to Berkman to little guys looking to do little things (the Intuit Ale deal for instance).
