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The Accidental Developer

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The Accidental Developer

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The Accidental Developer

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Real estate in Florida

Pensacola's Accidental Developer

A former hospital executive wants to connect Pensacola with its waterfront.

Mike Vogel | 11/12/2018

Monday's Afternoon Update - Florida Trend

Downtown Pensacola today features a thriving, albeit small, main drag, with coffee shops and eateries, retailers, French Quarter-style architecture, new residential apartments, plus single-family homes within walking distance. The urban renewal has been the subject of national press attention and plaudits from authorities on stellar urban planning.

Credit for the turnaround goes to an ensemble of private sector and governmental players, but a lead role goes to Quint Studer, a Midwestern health care executive who came to Pensacola in 1996 to run Baptist Hospital.

Four years later, he founded his own health care company in nearby Gulf Breeze. He did so well that he and his wife, Rishy, bought an independent baseball team. In 2004, over a meal, Pensacola’s city manager pitched him on bringing the growing health care business and the team to a moribund downtown.

Studer became a student of community building and realized downtown mattered most. He wanted a vibrant locale that attracted young people. He met with consultants and researchers and visited other cities. A visit to Asheville, N.C., excited him and also “somewhat depressed” him because Pensacola had so far to go.

Working with city officials, Ken Ford, head of Pensacola-based Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and others led to the 2006 voter approval of a public-private plan to create a park on the site of a defunct waterfront fuel terminal. The park would house his baseball team and business, a maritime museum and civic amenities. Studer would invest $15 million, the maritime museum would raise $12.8 million and the city agreed to raise another $41.6 million through financing. He acquired a minor league team in Zebulon, N.C., and relocated it to Pensacola. It took the field in 2012 as the Blue Wahoos and draws 300,000 a year.

Meanwhile, the Studers became prolific investors in downtown — $129 million by his count — that began with a focus on taking Palafox and Main from a junction with two vacant buildings and two empty lots and turning it into a great intersection. Rishy Studer opened Bodacious Brew on one corner of what’s now a busy intersection. Last fall, Studer completed a 258-unit apartment development with a retail component. Downtown property’s assessed value has risen 29%.

Studer says he’s not done. His puzzle now is how to stretch development to other parts of downtown. He’s starting with a building that will have 24 residential units atop ground floor retail.

The larger puzzle is the waterfront. Pensacola sits on a bay but the downtown, with an exception or two, has no actual access to use the water for recreation. Owing to the city’s industrial waterfront roots — and height restrictions — water-view development hasn’t really occurred. “I think height is good,” he says. He’s put in a proposal to get the development rights for a seven-parcel, 4.75-acre city-owned property that’s proved economically difficult to develop on the waterfront. He owns 19 acres nearby. The combination should allow development to be economically feasible. “That gives us the ability to take it to the next level,” Studer says.

Studer has liked to say he’s a health care executive, not a developer. Now that he’s developed 600,000 square feet, it’s a posture he finds harder to maintain. He’s even written a book about his development experiences: “Building a Vibrant Community — How Citizen-Powered Change is Reshaping America.” In it, he notes early on, “My involvement was purely accidental.”

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