Affordable housing project doomed to fail in Sarasota
Predicting affordable housing boondoggle
What are two of the hottest buzzwords around town today? Yes, “affordable housing.”
Well, our city manager has mistakenly convinced the Sarasota City Commission that the city should become a landlord in the affordable housing game (“Sarasota City Commission approves city-owned ‘attainable housing’ proposal,” April 15). The plan is to purchase property across from City Hall and construct rental units that would fit that profile.
I have not seen or heard one word about a business plan for this venture. Has consideration been given to all the costs and expenses of such an undertaking?
Pool of $40 million: As need grows, Sarasota County offers funding to nonprofit, for-profit developers
Acquisition and construction costs aside, how about rental rates versus anticipated vacancies, turnover vacancy, delinquencies, collection efforts, potential eviction and legal expenses, repairs and upkeep, insurance for structure and liability, the inevitable trip-and-fall lawsuit, compliance issues, etc.?
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Also, one of the first things the public sector does when becoming involved in a new program is increase staffing. Translation: more people, salaries and benefits.
This venture will most definitely become a taxpayer-subsidized burden. Historically, public sector housing ventures eventually become expensive problems. If this continues to gain traction, buckle up for a costly ride!
Matt Ruch, Sarasota
Developer saves 211 from county ax
Let us acknowledge with thanks a humane act by local developer Hugh Culverhouse, who understands the need to keep the United Way’s 211 helpline operational through 2024.
Against that act we have the defunding of all services to United Way because, according to a resolution OK’d by the Sarasota County Commission, “Abortion services are incompatible with the values of Sarasota County …”
Commissioner Neil Rainford said the resolution fits into the county’s mandate “to protect people.”
So this five-man panel has mandated that it is better to save an unborn entity than to look to the living who are today suffering among us – and who need the services and funds of United Way in order to live in the here and now. God protect me from people like them!
Mary Lou Tosques, Sarasota
‘We are Hamas’: Hate speech at protests
Make no mistake: These protests on college campuses are not simply “freedom of speech.” It is hate speech reminiscent of 1930s Nazi Germany.
Shouting “We are Hamas” and blocking sidewalks to prevent Jewish students from attending class is not the moral equivalent of supporting the Palestinian people. It is antisemitism, plain and simple.
As a former high school teacher, I developed many lessons on the Holocaust after Fulbright studies in Israel and Egypt.
Students corresponded with Elie Wiesel while reading his autobiography, “Night,” created a huge Holocaust quilt, hosted community awareness nights and won national Holocaust writing contests.
We visited the Florida Holocaust Museum, in St. Petersburg, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. About 30 students stood with me in stunned silence in Dachau.
Their biggest question was how the world could have stood by and watched as millions of Jews and others were at first intimidated and excluded from school and jobs, then rounded up and sent to ghettos, and then walked into gas chambers and ovens.
They learned that the evil didn’t begin with the death camp perpetrators. It began with the apathy of the bystanders who did nothing to stop the violent rhetoric in its early stages.
Janet Kerley, Bradenton
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota should stay out of the landlord business
