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.”