SPOTLIGHT: PENSACOLA
Pensacola a Primer on Job Migration to Affordable Housing Markets
BY PETER MILLER, STAFF WRITER
The Amazon HQ2 bidding war is so huge that hundreds of economic development offices have mailed in their proposals and plans (see the December 2017 Housing News Report).
shelter all of the navies of Europe.” Today Pensacola is the site of a variety of Navy installations and home to the famous Blue Angels flying team. Pensacola would seem to be a natural fit for Navy Fed, but economic development projects don’t quite work that way. There has to be more, and “more” in this case means available land, low housing costs, and help from state and local governments.
The largest credit union in the world is Navy Federal, a financial colossus with seven million customers and $87 billion in assets. Headquartered outside Washington, D.C., Navy Fed is building an operations center on a 306-acre campus in Beulah, an unincorporated area minutes west of Pensacola, Florida. Within five years the center is expected to employ 10,000 local workers, making it one of the largest commercial development projects in the country.
Yet Amazon is not the only corporate behemoth looking for a home.
There are other big organizations seeking new places to locate or expand and, while not as big as the Amazon project, these corporate ventures can substantially impact local communities, often with relatively little public cost.
In 2003 Navy Fed opened a Pensacola call center that could ultimately
In the 1700s Pensacola Bay was described as being “large enough to
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FEBRUARY 2018 | ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS
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