BlogWood: MT Archives

Rich whites, token black join to displace public housing residents

Both the Tribune and the SP Times have fairly long articles on this today, but both seem rather star-struck by the grand plans to further enrich Tampa’s elite.

Overview

Let’s start with the Times’ simple summary of the plans:

Ed Turanchik and his partners at Civitas want to:

Take control of 157 acres, including the Central Park Village housing complex, to build a master-planned urban community.

Design a community that transforms a predominantly poor neighborhood into a mixed-income one, with as many as 1,000 low-income units and 3,500 market-rate residences.

Build a European-style boulevard along Cass and Tyler streets that connects Central Park to the new cultural arts district on the Hillsborough River. Residential high-rises would line the streets.

Develop low-cost housing across the city where displaced tenants of the Central Park housing complex could move. The group has control of at least 250 lots on which they propose erecting manufactured houses called "Renaissance homes."

Fund a nonprofit, A Foundation for a Better Place, using fees paid by residents of the new project.

Open a manufacturing plant in east Tampa to produce steel components for low-cost homes. The material would be used in Renaissance homes and other homes across central Florida.

Hmmm... all of that sounds pretty good. But let’s get real. With a careful reading of the Tribune and Times, one can begin to get an idea of what is going on here.

The overseers:

ED TURANCHIK, managing director of Civitas, the urban redevelopment company that plans to redevelop the Central Park Village area. Led the unsuccessful effort to bring the 2012 Olympics to Florida. Helped create Tampa Bay Water, the region's water supplier. Pushed to build a National Hockey League arena in downtown Tampa. A former county commissioner.

DON WALLACE, chairman of Civitas. Chief executive officer, Lazy Days RV Super Center. Major philanthropist.

BILL BISHOP, managing director of Civitas. President, Leslie Land Corp. Former land development director, Newland Communities. Developed Westchase and the FishHawk Ranch.

MANDELL "HINKS" SHIMBERG, board member of Civitas. Developer who built sections of Town 'N Country. Chairman, USF Foundation board. Past chairman, Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.

RHEA LAW, board member of Civitas. Past chairwoman, Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce. Member, USF board. Lawyer and partner, Fowler White Gillen Boggs Villareal & Banker, which will handle land use and permitting for Civitas.

THOMAS HUGGINS III, board member of Civitas. President, Ariel Business Group, a management consulting firm. Chairman, Tampa-Hillsborough Urban League board. Co-chairman, 1998 Jeb Bush campaign in Hillsborough County.

REX FARRIOR, board member of Civitas. President, Farrior Enterprises LLC, a real estate and corporate investment company.

CHARLEY HANNAH, board member of Civitas. Co-founder, Hannah-Bartoletta Homes. Former NFL player, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Los Angeles Raiders.

DEANNE ROBERTS, marketing and public relations director for Civitas. Chairwoman, Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce board. Founder, marketing and public relations firm.

BETTY WIGGINS, director of community relations for Civitas. Former Tampa City Council member. Director, East Tampa Business and Civic Association.

Mostly white, all Tampa insiders. This crowd is very well versed on skimming money from the public trough. And don’t be misled into thinking that just because someone works for a non-profit that they are doing good. If you want to judge the value of a non-profit that claims to be doing good for whatever cause, look at the executive salaries and other administrative overhead as a percentage of expenditures. Then look at what they are actually spending on whatever cause they are championing. This is not an iron clad rule, but non-profits that funnel a high percentage of income toward executive salaries are often set up primarily to enrich those executives. Then crumbs are sometimes thrown, with much pomp and circumstance, to whomever the non-profit claims to be in business to help.

Forced DISlocation

Here are the most important details of this proposal, buried deep in the articles:

Turanchik would need to convince more than 2,000 low-income, largely minority residents to trust a privately held group of investors, who would take over their homes and relocate them.
......

In the courtyards at Central Park, no one had met Wallace or Turanchik. They had only heard rumors of the plans for them.

"Why would you tear down something nice?" asked Inez Priester, 64, who raised her nine children here. People's lives would be improved by taking simple steps like planting flowers and painting walls, she said.

"Because we're right downtown, they want to come in and take it away from us," she said.

Under Turanchik's plan, every resident would get to move to another home by the time bulldozers arrived.

The residents could find their own affordable housing or choose Turanchik's lots. Months or years later, they could move back to the newly designed Central Park, which will be predominantly upscale. About 80 percent of the new residences would sell at market rates from $125,000 to $650,000.

About 980 units out of 4,500 residences would be set aside for subsidized housing. Of those, 257 would be considered public housing units - reserved for the poorest of the poor.

"All we are doing is providing a much wider array of choices," said developer Bill Bishop, one of Turanchik's partners.

Wait a minute... Civitas is throwing a big coming-out party, but they have not bothered to go out and meet the residents who they are going to kick out of the neighborhood. Well, perhaps some poor folks could attend the party and find out what’s going to happen to them? Think again.

"We know all to well what is going on inside - that is why they don't want us in there," said Sateesh Rogers, from St. Petersburg, a member of the Uhuru movement. "The buildings will look nice, but who will occupy them?"

Rogers was barred at the door from entering, where staff checked people's photo identifications.

The Tribune doesn’t bother to bury the fact that only 257 public housing units will be replaced. They just ignore it in favor of this rosy statistic:

In the end, about 2,000 new affordable rental housing units would spread from Central Park to other neighborhoods in east Tampa, West Tampa and Tampa Heights.

Notice the careful wording. These are “affordable units,” not “public housing units.” This seems to mean that the “poorest of the poor” will be left with nowhere to go:

``There will be nice homes,'' Rogers said, ``but guess what? Blacks folk won't be here.''

Shotgun shacks

The lucky ones, those who work 2 or more minimum wage jobs, will get to be forcefully dislocated from a neighborhood that many of them were born in and scattered around town in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Here’s more on that concept:

The key to Civitas providing new homes for public housing residents lies in its plan for the manufacturing plant.

Company leaders said they expect to close this month on a contract to buy the former Premier Windows factory at 5107 N. 22nd St., where they would open the plant called Renaissance Steel by the end of 2004.

The plant would produce ``panelized'' light-gauge steel to be used for new homes throughout Central Florida. In Tampa, the materials would be used to build ``shotgun-style homes for the 21st century,'' Turanchik said.

Those would include single- family houses and duplexes to be built on narrow lots with architecture intended to blend in with neighborhoods.

Civitas contends that using ready-to-assemble parts of steel, instead of wood, to frame the structures makes them more durable and affordable than traditionally built homes. The factory also would create local jobs.

Yeah... local jobs as highly paid salesmen and executives for the cronies of Turanchik and his crowd, and low-wage grunt work for current community residents. Forming the for-profit company will also allow these guys to “sell” all the building materials to themselves, thus cutting other middlemen out of the profits. 10 years from now, when all of this blows up in a huge explosion of conspiracy and fraud and theft and graft, this company will probably be a key entity.

Outside of Central Park, the group plans to build low-cost homes on hundreds of lots in east Tampa, West Tampa and Tampa Heights. They would not only provide the lots, but provide the residences, dubbed "Renaissance Homes," too.

Another company called Renaissance Steel would open a plant on 22nd Street in east Tampa to produce the steel panels for the new low-cost homes. The factory, financed by Bank of America, could employ at least 100 new workers.

Turanchik's group claims a list of wealthy investors as backers, and claims to own or have contracts pending on most of the land in the 157 acres.

Besides building homes, the project promises a social re-engineering of the economic order of downtown. Depending on what happens, as many as 2,000 people could be moved to other parts of town.

I bet these wealthy investors really don’t care if they turn a profit or not, eh? Really... they’re in it to help poor people. Actually, to be fair, the Times has a quote on just this subject. I just don’t believe a word of it:

His investors, led by Lazy Days RV Super Center CEO Don Wallace, promised that they truly wanted to improve the lives of the poor. They hoped the project would transform the urban core, not simply turn a profit.

"If I don't make a single penny on this or if I don't get my money back ... I will be the happiest person in the world," Wallace said. To make the project work, "we will have to be willing to say not "what is in this for me - what is in this for us."'

Remember: when someone this wealthy speaks of “us,” he is usually not referring to the urban poor. Words are cheap, and profits from this boondoggle are gonna be huge.

A silver lining?

They may be displacing families in order to make the rich richer, but they say that they’re gonna form a non-profit to help the community. What sweethearts!

The Civitas plan includes a deed restriction requiring at least a 1 percent ``transfer fee'' for properties it develops in Central Park. At least 1 percent of any land sale would fund a ``Foundation For A Better Place.''

The foundation would be incorporated as a charitable organization intended to help pay for social services, affordable housing, minority enterprises and other efforts, according to Civitas.

The company would set up a financing structure to pour millions into a new non-profit, A Foundation for a Better Place, that would pay for concerts, social events, and charity work. It would leverage federal housing money to set up a trust fund to maintain low-cost and public housing units.

Remember: non-profit foundations have paid boards, paid executives, and lots of perks for board members and executives. We get no more details about this non-profit than what is here. I have no doubt that the non-profit will be set up. It will be used to further enrich the key players in this scheme, and probably bring Jimmy Buffet to town once a year. The urban poor are known to be HUGE parrot-heads.

So, the poor will be helped through dislocation and concerts while a small group of elite investors makes gads of money. What’s not to like?

"It seems to me it's being done for the benefit of the developers," said County Commissioner Pat Frank.

Frank, who hasn't seen a concrete proposal, wants to know details.

"My paramount concern is "What does it do to the people who are already there?"' Frank said. "I have a lot of questions."