Posted on 01/06/2004 4:55:15 AM PST by AppyPappy
Project Homestead backers rail against media
GREENSBORO — A group of prominent black leaders and politicians warned Monday that Project Homestead will collapse unless the News & Record ends its “negative publicity” of the nonprofit, low-income housing builder.
“It is virtually impossible for Project Homestead to continue to operate in this climate,” said state Rep. Alma Adams, a Greensboro Democrat who led the press conference held by the “Friends of Project Homestead” at Homestead’s former headquarters on Martin Luther King Drive.
“The newspaper is intent on destroying this organization,” declared state Rep. Earl Jones, also a Greensboro Democrat.
News & Record Editor John Robinson defended the newspaper’s coverage of Project Homestead.
“We believe our readers and Greensboro taxpayers have the right to know how Project Homestead has spent the millions of dollars of tax money it has received,” Robinson said. “Because of the public interest involved, we’ll continue to ask questions and write stories about Homestead’s expenditure of public funds as it gets its house in order.”
(Excerpt) Read more at news-record.com ...
| Rank | Location | Receipts | Donors/Avg | Freepers/Avg | Monthlies | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 | Nevada | 210.00 |
2 |
105.00 |
114 |
1.84 |
60.00 |
3 |
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Nothing to see here, it is just taxpayer money, move along...
Uh-huh ...
Well duh, that is the case with any product. If there are enough people that have problems, they will think all of that product is a lemon. Of course Homestead not acting on the complaints is just adding fuel to the fire. Either get your sh1t together or die the death you deserve.
City Loses A Leader
By John Hammer
Greensboro lost a leader and I lost a good friend when Rev. Michael King died Saturday. I’m going to miss him and Greensboro is going to miss him because he was a man who cared about people and made things happen. He did a lot of good work for this community, and thousands of people are living in their own homes because of King.
All the talk of late has been about Project Homestead, but King was a member of the old Greensboro Board of Education when he was still in his 20s, and he was the chairman of the Guilford County Board of Social Services during some of its more tumultuous years in the 1990s.
It was as chairman of the Social Services Board that I first got to know King. He needed a ride back to his office from a Social Services Board meeting, and I offered to give him one. He was surprised at the offer, and before he got in my car shouted to those still around, “I’m getting in John Hammer’s car. If ya’ll don’t hear from me tomorrow, call the police.” He was laughing, but up until that point I had not written anything about King that could be called complimentary, so people were surprised. We ended up talking that night for three or four hours, maybe longer. We found we agreed more on politics than most people would think, but that still left plenty of room for disagreement. That was the beginning of a relationship where King discovered that I really wouldn’t write stories about things he told me privately, and where I found someone who knew a side of Greensboro that I didn’t, but also knew what it was like to start and run a small business.
What King is known for and will be remembered for is Project Homestead. But it seems that many have already forgotten that Project Homestead was created from nothing by King. Greensboro had made a commitment to build affordable housing, but the efforts to do so weren’t working out as planned, until Project Homestead came along.
Project Homestead built over 1,000 homes for people who would most likely not be homeowners if it weren’t for King. Some of the problems of late in the nonprofit affordable housing business are the result of Project Homestead filling the available land with houses much faster than anyone predicted.
The result of our long conversation the night I gave him a ride was that I became convinced that affordable housing was a worthwhile project for the city. It would take a bit longer for me to be convinced that King was the person to build it, but I did become convinced and he certainly did build affordable housing.
People seem to have also forgotten about one of the other big affordable home builders – the Greensboro Episcopal Housing Ministry (GEHM). It turns out that GEHM was misusing city funds and basically went bankrupt.
The mayor and the City Council turned to an affordable housing expert they felt they could trust to rescue them from a financial mess and the possibility of losing millions of dollars. That savior was King. He went in and worked it out. He rescued the city, saved the taxpayers millions, and saved the City Council from huge globs of embarrassment, but that also changed King’s relationship with the city for the worse.
..more..on next post
It’s odd how things worked out. He did a huge favor for the city and everybody was the winner except King. He lost because he lost his trust in the city to do what was right.
In putting together the deals to rescue GEHM, King found out that the city had allowed GEHM much more leeway with money than they allowed him. That is one of the factors that led to the showdown over the ongoing city audit. King didn’t just feel like he was treated differently, he was treated differently. If the city had had the same restrictions on GEHM that they had on King, then GEHM would not have been able to get in as much financial trouble as it did.
I don’t know any way to write about King without writing about Project Homestead. I know that he was the pastor of a church, and I always intended to attend one of his services but never did, and so I never saw that half of his career. I did sit in his office at Project Homestead and talk about business and politics for hours.
The other newspaper has made quite an issue of King going on a cruise paid for by Homestead. I saw the letter asking King to go on the cruise to discuss having a nationally syndicated morning radio show do its program from one of Homestead’s housing blitzes. It seems that if Homestead hadn’t paid for the trip, then the Chamber of Commerce certainly should have been willing to foot the bill. To have a couple of hours of free air time on a nationally syndicated radio show is invaluable publicity and is the kind of thing the chamber should be supporting. It is also the kind of thing that the City Council would support if one of their favorites had suggested it.
When I heard King had gone on a cruise, I was relieved that he was taking some time off. It was only later that I found out he wasn’t taking time off, he was just working somewhere different.
Being workaholics and not being happy about it was one of the things we found that we had in common. King started Project Homestead just about the same time my brother and I started The Rhinoceros Times. Project Homestead was a nonprofit, but it was essentially a small business run by one man. King worked all the time. He would call me up sometimes and say, “Hammer, I am so tired.” And then we would get into a good-natured argument about who needed a vacation more. Before the conversation ended, we would both be telling the other that he had to take some time off. And then we would both have a long list of upcoming projects that were going to prevent us from leaving our offices for the foreseeable future.
King had a heart attack last spring and went back to work before the doctors told him he should. Once he started working, he couldn’t stop himself from working long hours – maybe not as long as before the heart attack, but too long. He was taking a lot of medication for his heart condition and knew that it affected his memory and his thought process. During all of this the city was demanding the right to re-audit the books for time periods it had already spent months auditing.
King was an entrepreneur, which is why he was able to build more than 1,000 houses, three senior centers, a shopping center, a training center and, no doubt, a bunch of other things. But he was not a detail man. He put deals together, but I have no doubt that if money was needed for one project and there was not enough money in that account but there was money in another account, he’d write that check and worry about the consequences later.
In the last major audit the city performed, it didn’t find anything, even though it spent months looking for something.
Now that King has died, I have no doubt that the city audit will find some discrepancies. Since it appears that the city contributed to his death by demanding the audit, it can hardly audit the books for months, hire outside contractors to help and then concede that King was right and everything was in tiptop shape.
The city is going to find some things (auditors always do), and King will not be here to defend himself or explain them. I know that the financial dealings were extremely complicated, and I don’t understand a lot of what has been explained to me. But I was also privy to a conference call between a high-level Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official and King. The HUD official said that his department had no problem with any of the funds that it had allocated to Project Homestead and that HUD was not requesting and could see no reason for another audit of Homestead. The official also said that if the city wanted to audit Homestead again, that was the city’s business.
King used to tell me that I needed to take a vacation, and I used to tell him that he needed to get out of the nonprofit business and into the for-profit business. My argument was that he could probably build as many or more houses as a for-profit builder, but the houses would just be a little more expensive and not quite as nice as he was currently building. That was the problem for King. He agreed that his life would be much simpler if he didn’t have to mess with government money, but he said it was the only way he could build nice houses that the people who needed them could afford.
After my chair-throwing, name-calling confrontation with then school board member Keith Green, when I was being labeled a racist, King stood up for me. He wrote a letter and, more importantly, talked to people and told them that I was an unrepentant, hardheaded conservative, but I wasn’t a racist. It would have been far easier for King to say it wasn’t his fight and he didn’t want to get involved, but he didn’t do what was easy, he did what he thought was right.
In all of my dealings with King, that is what I found him to do. He didn’t do what was easy, but did what he thought was right. It would have been far easier for him to build a few houses and run his church, which would have been more than enough for most folks, but he had the energy and the ability to turn Project Homestead into a major builder, and he did.
I am sorry that he died and sorry that he died at a time when there is so much controversy surrounding his business and personal life. And I am fearful for his family because he is no longer here to defend himself.
Gotta say he lost me here. Why not a phone call to discuss a radio program? Or an e-mail? If the Chamber of Commerce wants to pay for this kind of stuff, that's between them and their donors ... but the taxpayers?
Between this and the "non-profit affordable housing" schtik (Why don't we have for-profit affordable housing? Because the government won't allow it ...) Mr. Hammer's talking like a socialist. The usual game, how do "we" allocate the taxpayer's money among the "right" people ...
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