Drew Dixon
One of the fastest growing counties in Florida and in the United States is going to be nearly doubling in population in the next quarter century, at least according to the St. Johns County Comprehensive Plan projections through 2050.
All Florida counties are required by the state to develop Comprehensive Plans to help guide development within the municipalities. But St. Johns has been experiencing massive growth and development this century, and county planners now project that the population in St. Johns could easily exceed 600,000 people by 2050.
Workshops and public reviews of the Comprehensive Plan were organized by the St. Johns County Commission this month, allowing residents to get a grip on the possibility of a population explosion from the current number of about 361,000 to about 665,000 in 2050, based upon figures provided by the University of Florida (UF) Bureau of Economic and Business Research.
The UF report provided population projections for every Florida county for the next 25 years. But St. Johns is going to see one of the sharpest increases in population, at least according to projections.
The St. Johns County Comprehensive Plan provides detailed reports on how the impact from population growth will impact areas of the county government, such as land use, transportation, housing, infrastructure, coastal conservation, recreation and other areas requiring government services.
But the housing element will likely have the most dramatic impact in the next quarter century, as handling a doubling of the population will require a massive amount of new housing.
“The Comprehensive Plan is a document that has all of our policy in it, so it’s a broad document, and it addresses a lot of things, but at its core, it addresses development,” said Michael Roberson, St. Johns County Growth Management Director. “The current Comprehensive Plan currently goes to 2025, so, in short, it needs to be updated. The updated version will be referred to as Planning Horizon 2050.”
Development is already sprawling throughout St. Johns County and there are already 350 housing developments in the construction or planning phase in that county alone, according to a county development tracker.
While the county Comprehensive Plan stipulates that the government needs to address affordable housing, St. Johns County has the highest prices for homes on the First Coast. The Northeast Florida Association of Realtors Association (NEFAR) published this month showed the median St. Johns County price for a home is more than $600,000, more than any of the other counties in the six-county region.
