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Ed Turanchik's land of imagination

Didn’t I see this story in a movie somewhere?

Here’s the setup: Con men form Civitas a front organization and purport to have a bridge, or perhaps some slightly swampy land for sale. They want to cut a great deal on the land, but they can’t let anyone see the land or know where it is. These guy’s seem perfectly honest, though: they are pale of skin, they dress like wealthy businessmen, and they use really big words when they talk. Why, people like this (people like “us”?) would never dream of selling anyone a lemon.

Part of the con is a hard sell. The Ed Turanchiks con men manufacture a great false sense of urgency about the whole affair, implying that if the deal isn’t done now that the pigeons might realize they are being conned the whole thing will fall through and everyone will miss out on a huge pile of riches.

There’s often a big pile of something involved in these deals, but it aint riches. And if the cons are real professionals, they will blind their marks with bright lights and smoke and mirrors, and the mark will be sure that the big pile of, uh, whatever, that the mark is buying is actually a nice big shiny bauble piece of valuable urban real estate. The Welfare Daddies con men will take their cash and run away even as the bauble starts to tarnish con begins to become apparent, but often it is years before the mark realizes the full extent of the fraud.

That’s pretty much what happened with Centro Ybor. The city is now on the hook for $16 million, even as the con men private developers who sold us this big pile of mall continue to draw their 6 figure salaries from the companies that now claim poverty.

Which brings us to a new group of cons Civitas, a group that wants to bring this con kind of deal to a whole new level. Civitas proposes to dislocate thousands of poor people of color so that they can build a gilded palace for thousands of rich white people. A big part of their proposal is a land swap with the Tampa Housing Authority. The dislocated would be relocated into “temporary” housing on this new parcel.

One problem: Civitas does not own any land to swap:

A proposed partnership between the Tampa Housing Authority and Civitas is in jeopardy because the redevelopment company has not produced any evidence it owns land it wants to swap.

Civitas said it would give the authority land to build replacement housing before it tears down Central Park Village, a public housing complex. Without the land, the housing agency would be forced to scatter the 1,316 residents while a new complex is built.

The housing authority board is scheduled to vote on the deal Friday.

``We have a serious problem,'' board member Gerald White said. ``Someone will have to do some talking and convincing in a hurry to get my vote.

``That was one good selling point Civitas had. It gave me a sense of ease and comfort to know no one would be displaced. This is a serious stumbling block.''

Uh, yeah, I would say that if Civitas does not actually own any land to trade that perhaps the trade should not go through?

This land swap is a new twist, but I think I’m starting to figure out some of the details of Ed Turanchik’s secretive Plan to Take Over the World: Ed wants the city to trade real land for imaginary land. We can then build pretend houses on the imaginary land. Maybe we can even have some imaginary friends over to visit once we move in. Anyway, we’ll tell all of the current residents of Central Park to just close their eyes and picture clean, safe, affordable housing. Then we’ll dump them out in the swamps of Suitcase City and let them fend for themselves.

Meanwhile, once the darkies current residents are gone, Ed and his cohorts will be able to sell the real land for real money. The city will help out by paying for virtually every improvement in infrastructure and by providing amenities like new parks and playgrounds. Wealthy white people will move in and just marvel at the transformation as they enjoy a cocktail on the balcony and watch the sun set over Lake Turanchik. Cheers!

What's not to cheer about?

Pushed aside

To answer that, let's go back to September, on the sweltering afternoon when the Tampa Housing Authority held a grand opening ceremony for a development that had been in the works for five years.

The homes weren't ready to live in - the first residents wouldn't move in for another six months, as it turned out - but grass had been laid that morning, the clubhouse was open, and officials were ready to celebrate.

Fanning themselves with programs, more than a dozen federal, state and local officials praised the innovative housing program known as HOPE VI. The federal program had provided the $32.5- million grant that wiped out dreary College Hill and Ponce de Leon and gave birth to Belmont Heights Estates, which ultimately will cost upward of $85-million.

"This was an eyesore for so many years," then-Mayor Dick Greco said. These new homes, he said, "will allow people to live in dignity."

Bob Greer, president of Michaels Development Co., which oversaw the project, said "HOPE VI is . . . about tearing down the barriers that isolated a community of low-income residents from the rest of the city."

As proof of who would be living in dignity, reconnected to the rest of Tampa, officials called Brenda Washington to the podium. Washington, a 35-year-old hospital cafeteria worker who had lived in College Hill for three years, was going to be Belmont Heights' first official resident.

In her speech, Washington spoke to the many women who would soon be returning to this oasis as her neighbors.

"We need to respect this property," she said. "This is our future. We need to keep it looking nice."

Someone in the audience might have concluded that the people who would benefit from the development would be the 1,300 families that used to live there.

But nine months later, it's not that simple. Most of the new residents never lived here before, and many never lived in public housing.

Brenda Washington has not come back to Belmont Heights. When it came time to sign a lease, she decided that the rent was too high. Of the 109 new tenants, 37 are former residents of College Hill and Ponce de Leon. That ratio likely won't change much when the last of the 860 units is done late next year; more than half of the housing is set aside for people who can pay market-rate rents or close to them.

Critics of HOPE VI have long complained that the program is contributing to a shortage of affordable housing by tearing down more units than it rebuilds. Tougher readmission standards make it harder for former residents to get back in.

Across the country, as few as 11 percent of former residents are living in neighborhoods that have been revitalized by HOPE VI developments, according to a study last year by the National Housing Law Project.

Many of the displaced residents are not much better off than when they moved out several years ago. Many live in poor neighborhoods with higher crime than the rest of the county, like they did before. Many are still unemployed, still on welfare. Their credit is still bad, and so is their health.

"You didn't solve their problems," said Larry Keating, an expert in public housing policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "You just swapped out a better class of poor people."
......

The project that was supposed to solve a crime problem in one neighborhood ended up moving it to another.

In 1999, state Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa, thought that the area west of USF had finally shed its seedy reputation as "Suitcase City."

Crist wasn't that surprised to see an influx of young women pushing strollers in the midday sun as they walked from apartment complex to apartment complex. The women were displaced residents from College Hill and Ponce de Leon looking for a place to use their new Section 8 housing vouchers.

Soon Crist started getting reports from Hillsborough County sheriff's officials about spiking crime in an area that was being vigorously patrolled as part of the federal Weed and Seed program.

From the fall of 1997 through the fall of 2001, shootings and stabbings increased 22 percent. Vehicle theft was up 26 percent, robbery 24 percent. Some kinds of crime dropped just as significantly (burglary and theft, for example), but the jump in violent crime was alarming.

"Cities across the country are using HOPE VI to displace their problem," Crist said. "I don't have any problem saying that."

Susan Greenbaum, a professor of anthropology at USF who directed the study, does not mince words about the real motivation of HOPE VI.

"I think this is a poverty dispersion strategy. The notion that (HOPE VI) is for the population that has been displaced is disingenuous," she said.

"Nobody would argue the projects were a good place to live. But they were the most affordable alternative for people of low income."