By Jeremy Morrison, Inweekly
A key component in Pensacola’s plan to increase housing availability in an effort to combat homelessness has been removed from the table. Officials were alerted this month that Lotus Campaign, Inc., a partnering non-profit, didn’t feel that the city was ripe for a landlord participation pilot program.
“Some of that has to do with the scale and size of Pensacola; some of that has to do with the current dynamics of the market in general,” Lotus’s Beth Silverman explained to the Pensacola City Council during its Nov. 7 agenda conference.
Earlier this year, the city contracted with Lotus, which engages both for-profit landlords and non-profit organizations to provide housing to homeless individuals. Mayor Robinson met Lotus leaders in June 2021 when they made a presentation to CivicCon.
Since March, the organization has been doing due diligence research on the Pensacola area and has determined that the city could not adequately support the type of program it conducts.
While Lotus surveyed area property management and nonprofit organizations, it determined that only three landlords and two non-profits would be contenders for the organization’s partnership program.
“We put in a due diligence period for this exact purpose, to make sure that we can find strong partners and set up a program for success,” Silverman told city council members. “Where we are today is that we do not feel confident that we’re going to be able to find more than a few partners, and we don’t think this is going to be an effective leverage of public funding to fund a landlord participation program.”
The city had dedicated $400,000 of American Rescue Plan Act funds towards its Lotus partnership; the funds must be spent by 2024. Silverman suggested that the city would be better off taking what’s left of that money — about $384,000 — and putting it towards other efforts associated with housing needs.
“We just can’t take that amount of money if we’re not going to be able to knock it out of the park right away, especially with a clock ticking against it, with spending by 2024,” she said.
Pensacola City Councilwoman Teniade Broughton expressed some disappointment over Lotus’s withdrawal from its contract with the city. She had hoped the organization’s work would have proven more fruitful.
“This is very disappointing,” Broughton said, “because I was telling people to ‘wait on the LOTUS Campaign.”
Mayor Grover Robinson — the primary proponent of working with Lotus — asked Silverman how many housing units she thought Lotus could produce in the area using its program of private-non-profit partnership.
“Maybe five to10 when we launch — I mean, maybe,” Silverman said, explaining that she just didn’t feel the city was a good fit.
Robinson noted that the city still had the remaining ARPA funds available to work with and said he thought Lotus’s evaluation reaffirmed Pensacola’s shortage of rental housing stock.
“This was very valuable for us as a community,” Robinson said, adding that perhaps Lotus could be a relevant partner under different conditions. “This isn’t saying it would never work in Pensacola, this is just saying that in the market we find ourselves in at this particular time, there’s a deficit.”
Gee, if only anybody could have seen the Lotus debacle coming.
Oh wait that’s right–everybody did.
No doubt even some of the Council members who voted on it, under pressure from the STRONG MAYOR. What a sham, from the start, and one final reminder on his way out the door of Grover’s abysmal, *actual* track record on homeless issues (apart from the early PNJ puff pieces on the Task Force, which Jim Little has done a lot to correct). And one more reminder that the talking heads who have never been down on the ground with the issue have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s really too bad that District 6 voters couldn’t see through the fog of propaganda to understand that the bridge encampment was Grover’s making, and not Ann Hill’s. On the bright side, I really look forward to having Ann back as an unfettered advocate.
On another note, were it not for coming off an election and heading into the winter doldrums, there would be plenty exploding and getting exposed right now on how some of the poverty pimps scarfing up federal dollars are “conducting” themselves. Let’s just say there are some very strange new goings-on surfacing, along with some retread issues that never got fixed and are growing out of control again.
And any of the people who are up to no good who think that homeless advocates aren’t aware or have given up on dragging their corruption into the light are badly mistaken. Hopefully it all won’t get revealed against a backdrop of another round of constitutional lawsuits against the City, with the incoming leadership making noises about stricter (aka illegal) ordinances.
ps. Anybody know how that REAP audit is going?.
pps. Anybody from Lotus hanging around consultant-style to see what new front money they can absorb? Maybe one of them has experience in roundabouts…