Tower developer launches attack ads
Suggests critics don’t want poor people living downtown
The world’s largest nonprofit HIV/AIDS medical provider stepped up its effort to build affordable housing in Fort Lauderdale, launching an ad campaign attacking critics.
In an unusual approach for a developer, AIDS Healthcare Foundation tells viewers in television ads and direct mail that one of the city commissioners is a hypocrite. In full-page newspaper ads, the not-for-profit suggests that critics of its proposed 680-unit low-income apartment building don’t want poor people living downtown.
The building was touted as a place for the formerly homeless — or anyone with a low income. Small studio apartments, most of them 263 square feet, would rent for $500 a month, with a $100 security deposit.
South Florida consistently ranks as one of the least affordable housing markets in the nation. But city elected officials said the large number of proposed apartments and AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s refusal to compromise with the community turned them off.
City development officials said they’re still waiting for AHF’s responses to their critiques. On Wednesday, Mayor Dean Trantalis said he believes the plans will be redrawn, and “something will
be built there.”
“I’ve been talking to them,” Trantalis said. “I believe they’re in a mood to compromise.”
In the negative ad campaign, AIDS Healthcare Foundation suggests critics only want wealthy people living near them.
“What’s the difference?” the ad asks, comparing an approved downtown luxury high-rise tower to the proposed 15-story rental. “Is it who will live there?”
Fights over high-rise development have been waged around Fort Lauderdale’s downtown for 20 years. This fight, though, is different. Rather than returning to the drawing board to reduce the project’s size, as many developers have done in the face of intense opposition, AIDS Healthcare Foundation stood firm, lashing out.
The aggressive approach is one that CEO Michael Weinstein is known for. A social activist for decades, Weinstein sued many political foes. His brash embrace of controversy, as leader of a billion-dollar enterprise, is the subject of scores of newspaper and magazine headlines over the years, and even a book, “Righteous Rebels: AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s Crusade to Change the World.”
The nonprofit has spent millions backing or opposing ballot initiatives in California. Among the recent
campaigns was an effort to temporarily stop development in Los Angeles, but Measure S failed at the polls in 2017. Weinstein said highend development led to gentrification, raising prices and squeezing lower-income people out.
He and other AHF representatives took a similar philosophical approach to downtown Fort Lauderdale, arguing that affordable housing is the next frontier in civil rights, and that lowincome renters shouldn’t be relegated to the outskirts of downtown. The tower is a project of Healthy Housing Foundation, the relatively new housing wing of AIDS Healthcare Foundation.
Though four of the five city commissioners have said they oppose the current version of the project, Weinstein’s organization is singling out Sorensen.
Sorensen’s district includes the project site, at 700 SE Fourth Ave., and he has been vocal since his 2018 election about his intent to find solutions for homelessness. At one point, Sorensen set up a tent at the homeless camp downtown, and held his office hours there. He’s called a hypocrite and flip-flopper in the ads paid for by AHF.
“You campaigned on ‘making Fort Lauderdale a great place to live, work and play.’ Is that commitment just for our wealthier residents?” the direct mail piece asks.
The ad calls it “the definition of hypocrisy to act like a champion of the homeless,
while siding with development for the rich!”
“It’s absolutely absurd,” Sorensen said. One of the towers he’s accused of supporting was approved in 2016, before Sorensen was in office. And the ads don’t note that he opposed a luxury condo project, the Alexan-Tarpon River, not far from the AHF site.
The direct mail piece went to people in Sorensen’s commission district, but he said residents outside his district also said they received it. The short television spot, viewable on YouTube, is still airing on local channels. Full page ads have appeared in the South Florida Sun Sentinel week after week.
Sorensen said affordable housing should be spread out in the community, not packed into one building. Emails and input on the project are overwhelmingly negative, he said.
“I met with Michael Weinstein about compromise and working together,” he said. “They were not interested at all in that.”
The 1.3-acre property is L-shaped, east of Southeast Fourth Avenue, between Southeast Seventh and Eighth streets, south of the river downtown. It wraps around the higher-end Villa Tuscany, a three-story complex with 17 condos.
Imara Canady, communications director for AIDS Healthcare Foundation, said a survey by Strategy Group showed widespread support for the 345,000-square-foot, $71 million project that seeks no public subsidies. He did not disclose how many people were surveyed and did not reveal the poll’s margin of error.
Support was strong throughout the city, it showed, but it was lowest — 47 percent of those polled — in Sorensen’s commission district, where the tower would be built. Democrats and younger people, educated people and those with lower incomes were more likely to support it, according to the survey results, which were shared with the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“This project is an innovative way to provide truly low-income housing to hundreds of financially strapped individuals in the Fort Lauderdale,” Canady said in an email.
The apartments would be rented to seniors, students, disabled people and others earning up to half the median household income in Broward. That would be an annual income of $26,500 or less. The median income — half the households earn more, half earn less — is $53,000 a year. A minimum wage worker earns about $17,000 a year.
The apartments would not exclusively be for those living with HIV/AIDS.
City development officials said the building’s footprint is too large for the property, and asked for more details about whether social services would be provided — either in the building or in AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s clinic across the street.
Many critics have questioned whether hundreds of low-income renters would succeed without social services on site.
Jim Carras, a Victoria Park resident and adjunct professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said he doesn’t understand why people are so adamantly opposed.
“The fear is greater than the truth,” he said.
Carras said the project has a similar market as official affordable housing projects that receive government tax credits as project subsidies. Those developments don’t typically include social services in them, he said. “There seems to be a built in assumption as soon as you put in the words ‘low-income’ that they need services,” he said. “You don’t know that. You can’t stereotype that.”
Ralph Stone, director of Broward’s Housing Finance and Community Development Division, concurred.
“Most of the [affordable housing project] residents have jobs and families just like others,” he said in an email.