The southside of Jacksonville, Florida, is a large area to the east and south of the St. Johns River. It lies just to the north of the Mandarin neighborhood and west of the Intracoastal Waterway. It is a part of a city that has grown to become the largest in the state of Florida. Jacksonville is today home to about 840,000 citizens. In the 1960s, the population exploded from 200,000 to half-a-million.
Saint Johns, Florida is an unincorporated community of about 37,000 citizens that is a growing and upscale suburb of the city of Jacksonville. Saint Johns is in the northwest corner of Saint Johns County, approximately 15 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. It is about mid-way between downtown St. Augustine and downtown Jacksonville. The community includes swaths of protected wetlands and marshes, and numerous golf courses have been built here.
Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, is an unincorporated community that is home to about 38,000 residents in the "Jacksonville Beaches" area. This coastal town is only about 20 miles to the south of downtown Jacksonville. Residents can also enjoy the historic city of St. Augustine, only 25 miles to the south.
The fashionable, upscale and well-situated Mandarin neighborhood comprises part of the south side of Jacksonville, Florida. This historic neighborhood rests on the eastern shore of the St. Johns River across from Orange Park.
Nocatee, Florida, is a 13,000-acre master planned community in Ponte Vedra, in the northeastern corner of St. John's County and the southeastern part of Duvall County. Two-thirds of the land is preserved and protected habitat for wildlife. The PARC Group has designed a sustainable town that seeks to balance work and leisure. The community is further designed to be very walkable, thereby minimizing the need for motorized transportation.
The development lies just to the west of Ponte Vedra Beach. When the community is fully built out, the real estate in Nocatee will include 13,000 homes, 1 million sq-ft of retail and 4 million sq-ft of office space. In 2013 alone, over 800 new homes were sold, and this ranked Nocatee fifth among the master-planned communities in the U.S.
