On WCOA this morning, Pensacola Mayor Grover Robinson shared Baptist Health Care has a plan for its Moreno Street campus that will include affordable housing. He said the health system may release the plan later this week. The plan will require city funds.
1 thought on “Breaking: Baptist has plan for affordable housing”
Comments are closed.
Gee, let’s see.
Grover Robinson pulls the bait and switch he telegraphed from a mile away on the need to get the people out from under the bridge NOW–not in February, when groups that qualified for federal ARP funding and selected by Council would be ready to house and provide services, but NOW–and people are rushed out of the camp to…we’re not really sure yet where all. Except it’s in large part a mix of hotels and Pathways For Change’s new location on, you guessed it, Moreno Street.
Homeless advocates outside of Reap and Fearless Communities are still trying to figure out just exactly what went down, but it seems the able-bodied men were rolled out of the existing location to camp Chez Bookman, and then everybody else was stashed in hotels for now (?).
Who’s paying for all that? Because Pathways wasn’t awarded ARP funding by the City Council.
Is REAP footing the whole bill? And why didn’t anybody go to REAP’s existing SOS location?
(Two-word clue: North Hill.)
Thus Grover and Downtown’s months-long politicking, intentionally creating a crisis situation at the bridge so they could capitalize on the emergency of their own making, comes to its foregone conclusions:
–The homeless are out of a prominent location in the City (and I *am* relieved for the adjacent residents, just disgusted at how it went down);
–They got unnecessarily schlepped from one place to another with the Task Force positioning themselves as heroes in what they seem to think is an exercise in herding cats;
–We’ve got the beginnings of a Marbut-style encampment and diversion system that the Criminalize Homeless Squad have been salivating over for some time; and
–The fruits of the back door deals between the Mayor’s Office, the Task Force, the hospitals, and the Developers Who Love Them are starting to come into relief.
Next up: one or two prototypes to fool people into thinking that tiny home villages will be built all over the County as homeless solutions and real affordable housing, before they quickly transition to boutique, pay-to-play rental cabins a la The Dwellings in Tallahassee,, complete with tax breaks for the owner builders:
http://www.thedwellings.org/housing/
I suppose the Mental Health Task force will be revealing its place in this fiasco soon enough.
Meanwhile, my choice for the 5 people I’m going to check in with are
(1) one of the tens of thousands of black people in the state of Florida horrified at the passage of the racist bills flying through Tallahassee (with suicide rates in the Black male population escalating);
(2) a trans child made to feel like trash due to the bigoted language that surrounds the GOP trans bills;
(3) an elderly person freezing to death in their homes because our delegation and mayor sold us out for their friends at FPL;
(4) a family with a loved one who died during Delta while DeSantis dragged his feet on a monoclonal antibody site here; and
(5) a man whose partner burned to death in his arms while this Task Force politicked on giving him a hotel room or even a tent, because it happened in the County 750 feet off the City line.
Oh, and it will require City funds for all these folks to have their fingers in the pie! Of course it will. The hypocrisy and greed are unfathomable.
Council, please get control of this runaway freight train with whatever measures you can, hemmed in as you are from the disaster of the Autocrat Mayor experiment.