Broward Legal Aid Investigates Pompano Beach CRA Land Grab Practices

Dec. 6, 2011 - PRLog -- Janet R. Riley, Attorney for the Affordable Housing Advocacy Project of the Legal Aid Service of Broward County revealed that the agency is investigating the Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency’s misuse of code enforcement to clear out properties for development. The Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) has been long scrutinized for its illegal practices in taking property from residents, and now another tactic in the ongoing land grab scheme is seeming to be unearthed.

Attorney Janet R. Riley says that the Pompano Beach CRA has done such a good job of taking properties from residents, that it has left its so called Northwest Community Redevelopment Area decimated with residents made to leave in a hurry and subsequently vanishing to the winds. In looking to retrace the crimes against former citizens, who she says have often been difficult to find, she has put out an open call to victims of the land grabbing to contact her office.

Specifically Riley says that she is aware that the Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency was created illegally and had no authority of eminent domain in the first place to take properties. And yet this rogue agency managed to take “a lot” of property. She also says her office has found evidence that the Community Redevelopment Agency employed systematized harassment and financial terrorism through the City of Pompano Beach Code Compliance department to attempt to force people to leave their properties. Apparently the code enforcement practices were not intended to maintain structural safety, but intended to fine residents to the point the financial burden became too great, in which case residents would essentially give up their properties to pay off exorbitant fines and liens. If that didn’t work, the properties would be condemned and residents would be literally forced out of their homes.

And what is happening with these properties that were taken by the Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency? Well, not much. In the Hammondville Road redevelopment area, many properties were bulldozed and have sat as empty lots for years. The highly publicized taking of the thriving multi-million dollar historic Ali Building at 353 Hammondville Road led to that pristine and newly restored building being stripped, half demolished, and sitting unattended for years, left to decay from sheer neglect and eventually creating a haven for drug users. Last inspection shows that this once iconic building was recently boarded up like a box and painted solid white. Was this perhaps an attempt to “white out” the bad press that surrounds it? One can only speculate, but no clear plans have been made for what will happen to many of the properties. Signs have been erected on Hammondville Road saying that “The CRA is on the move” offering pre-leasing on some sort of vague future development, and a bus depot has been under construction for a long time in the area, but a decade after many of the illegal takings no real community redevelopment gains have been made and no affordable housing has been built.

And this is the Affordable Housing Advocacy Project’s specialty. How can properties be destroyed by an illegal agency supposedly in the name of community redevelopment and to supposedly provide affordable housing, and yet the result is there becomes no new affordable housing (and actually less), and once cozy residents and small businesses are displaced? And what is happening to all the funds for this supposed community redevelopment? And what about the incentive programs the Community Redevelopment Agency gives to certain recipients, like the private Eta Nu chapter of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity who received three separate grants on the taken and thence destroyed Ali Building which they never actually occupied and still sits (whited out) and abandoned?

Perhaps the only thing that is clear is that many questions remain about the Pompano Beach Community Redevelopment Agency’s redevelopment practices, and whether the Janet R. Riley and the Affordable Housing Advocacy Project will find answers, or not.

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For more information on the Affordable Housing Advocacy Project
at the Legal Aid Services of Broward, please visit:
http://legalaid.org/broward/legal-aid-services/affordable...

For more information on Pompano Beach CRA Gate visit:
http://www.wojspubs.com

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