Today, the daily newspaper reports on the chaotic town hall meeting at the Fricker Center held last Wednesday. The PNJ views the anger in the Black community as a “sense of loss of Black neighborhoods,” pointing out the city has lost 5,034 Black people since 2000.
- Background: At the town hall, city officials requested input early in the meeting on how to allocate a $9.5 million grant to improve the Fricker Center. Instead, one speaker after another took turns lambasting the City for turning its back on the Black community. Gerald Graham said, “I want to express my concern and disappointment that the mayor isn’t here. Gentrification has taken over this city, and people are being pushed out.” Read more.
Dig Deeper: One Black leader shared with me over the weekend that Mayor Reeves’ issue is much deeper than a “sense of loss” on the westside.
- “Black folks believe whenever the City fixes up something in our neighborhoods, the White folks take it over and push us out,” he said, citing Bruce Beach, Legion Field, Blount Middle School and Hallmark Elementary. “Look at all the sidewalks and street lights we now have on the west side since the White folks moved in.”
At the town hall, Graham expressed the distrust of the Black community: “Why all of a sudden are you going to put $9.5 million into the Black neighborhoods? Any time something like that happens, particularly in the Black neighborhoods, that means something else is coming behind it as an ulterior motive.”
ALL NEW HOUSING IS GOOD
Mayor D.C. Reeves has long argued that more housing, regardless of its price point, helps ease the affordable housing crisis.
“If I had one wish of the information that I could just magically convey to 55,000 people in this city right now, it’s a two- or three-minute education on just that fact more housing helps the community because there is such an us-versus-them mentality about housing,” he said in an interview in February 2024.
- “It’s unfortunate because if we snapped our fingers and had 500 market-rate units, like you’ve heard me talk about before, all that does is open up the additional opportunity for affordability for someone else,” Reeves said. “But we somehow fall into this trap of you’re either doing one or the other. If you see if it goes across ARB (Architectural Review Board) or city council that a market rate building’s coming up, you can rest assured that everyone on social media or Facebook comments will say, ‘Well, you don’t care about people who don’t make less money.”
He added, “And it’s that term I use with you all the time—we pat our head, rub our belly. We can do these both, and we have to.”
He asserted that building $800,000 homes or $2 million condominiums doesn’t mean one doesn’t care about “people who are in a more vulnerable state.” Mayor Reeves described the city’s efforts to sell the former Pensacola Sports site to provide the most tax revenue and the solicitation of proposals to convert Pensacola Motor Lodge into temporary housing as a “perfect microcosm.”
He said, “We’re working on both these things at the exact same time.”