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Tampa's Welfare Daddies only want $53 Million to dislocate poor.

Civitas is being forced to finally throw some numbers around.

Government financing would be on the hook for about two-thirds of an $80 million infrastructure tab in a company's plan to replace public housing with private development.

Civitas offered that estimate Monday in its latest proposal for the city and the Tampa Housing Authority to join in the redevelopment of 157 acres between downtown and Ybor City.

Before Civitas can replace public housing with new town homes, lofts and apartments, it needs taxpayer help to build new roads, parks and parking garages.

Civitas contends private money can pay for about one- third of the infrastructure costs.

But the company wants bonds backed by future tax revenue, as well as fees to be paid by home buyers, to cover the rest of the projected $80 million price tag.

``That number is too big of a number for any private-sector developer,'' said Ed Turanchik, the former Hillsborough County commissioner leading Civitas.

After two years of working in secrecy, Civitas has had to make more of its plans public as it tries to reach agreements with the city and the housing authority.

Adding urgency to the negotiations is a Jan. 20 deadline to apply for a $20 million federal grant to build replacement homes for public housing Civitas wants to

Don’t believe these preliminary numbers. Corporate welfare daddies always end up taking much more from the public till than they originally ask for. The Sp Times spins this story much differently, portraying Civitas as backing down in their demands, but there is a very interesting little nugget buried deep in their article:

On Monday, City Council chairwoman Linda Saul-Sena sent a memo to council members encouraging them to meet with developers one-on-one to ask questions.

"It is a very big, complicated project, and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered," Saul-Sena said.

Saul-Sena said she wasn't trying to circumvent Florida's government-in-the-sunshine law, which requires open meetings when more than one public official discusses government business.

Well, sure that’s what she’s gonna say. Just like I would say that I never got a blowjob from that intern. Saying it does not make it true, and there’s no way we will ever know what goes on in those private meetings.

We’ll never know, but here’s a prediction: city leaders will be bending over backwards to sell out to Ed, hoping to feast on whatever secret crumbs he throws them. Ed’s Plan to Take Over the World will move forward far enough to make the principal investors gads of money. We ,the public, will pay through the nose. Poor people will be moved out of sight of downtown, and their homes will be torn down. They will never come back, because Civitas has no intention of letting the wrong kinds of people move into Civitas’ empire neighborhood and bring down property values.

See, Civitas is tearing down “public housing” units and replacing them with a smaller number of “subsidized” housing units. The subtle difference in wording means that the poorest residents will be permanently dislocated to make room for rich people who can afford trendy $250,000 new construction “lofts”, but who don’t want to be troubled by living in a diverse urban environment.

The end result, if anything is ever actually built, will be a homogenized Genericity, marked by inoffensive architecture, with gates, walls, and security to keep the old residents from bothering the new. Genericity will be populated by unimaginative upper middle class Genericitizens who wish to buy into a (new and improved) Disneyfied version of urban living, people who want to be able to say they live in the city, but who really prefer it if the city is very much like the safe and quiet and predictable suburbs from whence they sprang.

Unimaginative Genericitizens will generically describe their new digs as “nice” and will be awed at the general transformation of an area that used to be “bad.” They will whine a bit about the difficulty in finding a maid who can get to work on time. The maid will have to spend 2 or 3 hours riding several HARTLine busses in order to reach her old neighborhood and take on menial work. The redevelopment will be hailed as a great success.