A.G. Gancarski
Rep. Alan Grayson, a Democrat running for Senate, visited Eureka Garden during his Jacksonville swing Sunday.
Grayson was not impressed.
His visit began with a conversation with a Jacksonville pastor, Elder Lee Harris, who told Grayson of the “dangerous conditions” at the complex, with Grayson asking if such issues, combined with situations such as the police killing of Vernell Bing Jr., added up to “institutional racism.”
Harris’ take: it was evidence of a “great divide” in the city.
“I saw your Division Street,” Grayson said to Harris. “We have a Division Street in Orlando and it is exactly what you think it is.”
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Grayson, who brands himself as the “Congressman with Guts,” was not as polemical on this occasion as he sometimes can be.
The media presence was small: FloridaPolitics.com, Folio Weekly and the Orlando public radio station were on hand, on this day of triple-digit heat and a merciless sun beating down.
Yet despite the heat and his perhaps ill-advised decision to wear a dark wool suit, Grayson had plenty to say.
When asked about Global Ministries Foundation, the nominal nonprofit whose neglect of this and other Jacksonville and Orlando properties led to Marco Rubio pushing for HUD reforms on the Senate floor, Grayson was surprisingly circumspect.
“Seeing what I see here,” Grayson said of GMF, “they’re not doing their job.”
Calling them a “slumlord” benefiting from massive government subsidies, the Democrat compared Eureka Garden unfavorably to the projects where he grew up in the Bronx.
“I lived in a project like this until I went to college,” Grayson said. “Growing up, you could call your superintendent or your state representative and get a broken window fixed.”
In contrast, the model that allows outfits like Global Ministries Foundation has no such recourse. A reform that Grayson would like to see: “local ownership,” which he believes might remedy money flowing into a company like GMF and then flowing out of the community, a situation he likened to people going to Wal-Mart and seeing the money go to China.
Grayson cited a “failure of trust … a failure on the part of government,” adding there is an “opportunity to do things better” and to “confer on people the life” that the model “intended.”
As well, Grayson said there was a “failure of privatization” in play, with “no way to hold anybody responsible.”
“If the owner dug in and said ‘we’re not quitting,’ legally, [the feds] could not do much,” Grayson said.
“There literally is a motive to screw people. We set it up that way,” Grayson added.
Grayson likened the conditions at Eureka Garden to the horrors of the private prison industry, which Grayson introduced an amendment to “try to kill.”
“The government has a monopoly on the legal use of force,” Grayson said, and the private prison industry effectively subcontracts that, creating a lack of accountability in which the “whole thing falls apart.”
Beyond that, Grayson notes, a “million people in this country” are incarcerated for marijuana possession.
The common thread between the prison state and hustles like Global Ministries Foundation?
A “fundamental squandering” of resources, said Grayson, one which interferes with “alleviating gross inequities.”
This misallocation of resources hasn’t been helped, Grayson added, by a slow recovery in the economy, which has been “limping along” for the last nine years, “sucked dry by people that rig the system for themselves,” the so-called “1 percent” that is “making huge amounts of money and not spending it.”
“We try to make that up with monetary policy,” Grayson said, “but that’s a hard thing to do.”
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Grayson met with the complex’s most outspoken activist, Mona Lisa Arnold, inside her apartment, which was well over 80 degrees due to the insufficient window air conditioning.
Arnold talked about a break-in after she spoke out about conditions.
“They broke into my house, they stole everything, they stole my education,” Arnold said.
Arnold has lived at Eureka Garden for over a decade, and she’s seen and heard it all.
“Gunshots every day, Rubio can’t tell me nothing,” Arnold said.
And 911 is a curse as much as a blessing.
“Call 911. They’ll come to your door,” Arnold said, and the community will treat you as a “whistleblower,” and “your head ends up on the floor.”
Arnold has seen “death and murder.” Her brother was killed, somewhere in Arlington, a few years back.
She also has spoken out, repeatedly, about the issues at Eureka Garden. She’s lived at the complex through multiple mayoral administrations. She’s heard the talk about the changes coming.
But she hasn’t seen it yet.
