Helping The Less Fortunate

Low cost housing is at a premium in this area. The Section 8 rules are so intrusive for landlords and tenants that few people want to put up with them. It is all well and good, that you need oversight of public money, but it is stupid to spend more money on inspections, that you spend on housing.

Getting low cost housing built around here is another problem, because local governments that depend on property taxes don’t want it. These same politicians don’t have a problem reducing or eliminating those same taxes for commercial development, but they don’t want poor people hanging around.

Then there are the developers.

The Pensacola News Journal reports on one of them: Land trust probe deepens

In October 2004, John Wyche paid the Escambia County School District $64,000 for the former L.A. Kirksey Elementary School on North D Street in downtown Pensacola.

Three years later, Wyche sold the property for $160,000 to the Escambia County Community Land Trust, a nonprofit organization of which he was executive director.

The plan was to build 20 so-called affordable condos at $350,000 to $500,000 each on the property and then use the profits on those sales to build low-income housing.

The land trust bought the property with some of the proceeds of a $281,270 loan from the The Florida Housing Finance Corp., a program that helps nonprofits acquire land for affordable housing.

Wyche had land, made a profit from that, and now was planning to build condos, to supposedly get the money to build affordable housing, for a given value of affordable. The low cost housing keeps getting kicked down the road, while the money for it is used to fund other things, all of which make Wyche wealthier.