JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Action News Jax is digging into an affordable housing program and how one group in particular failed to do that though it was able to get dozens of free properties. Five years after the program began, the fix could be worse than the problem.
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Action News Jax has been covering these broken promise properties for weeks and found the city’s plan to make it right could actually be a boon for the new owners and bad for affordable housing.
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In 2019 the city began a program that gave away surplus properties to people who promised to build affordable housing on them. One group of people jumped at the chance and were able to get a total of almost thirty of those free properties.
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They should have affordable housing on them by now, according to the program requirements. Instead, they sit empty long after the deadline to build. City records show all of the properties that group of people got are now owned by one man.
His name is Russ King and is a real estate agent in Orlando. Investigator Emily Turner got ahold of him on the cell number he gave the city. He answered our call but not our questions.
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That could be because records from the Office of Inspector General show 95% of the recipients in the program failed to deliver what they promised and all of the properties he now owns fall into that category.
King stands to benefit big time from the program, and more especially from its failure of accountability. Each recipient could get up to five properties by promising to build below market rate homes within two years. The properties he owns have none.
We traced that failure to him by following the trail in property records. They show a group of people collected 27 properties in that one year. Within a few months of getting the land, those people deeded it over to group of LLCs for a few thousand dollars each.
Those LLCs all eventually funnel back to Russell King with the Florida King Team. Since he turned down our interview request over the phone, we tried to find him at the address he gave the city of Jacksonville.
When we showed up, we found a company called Florida Homes Realty and Mortgage. When Action News Jax Emily Turner asked, “I’m looking for Russ Ring or someone who can talk to me about his affiliation,” she was asked to wait outside.
Eventually an employee came outside and said King was just an independent contractor and out of Orlando.
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So Action News Jax took a road trip down I-4. The first address listed for his business is a UPS store box. The second address is an empty conference room in an office building. The third was a home whose residents claimed not to know who he is
But Russ king has been available to the city as it tries to course correct the initial failures of the program. According to Travi Jeffrey, the city’s Chief of Housing and Community Development, “we’re definitely working positively. "
That could be because King still stands to make a really good deal. Non-compliant recipients of the free properties have the option to buy them off-market.
King is “wanting to pay the assessed value,” Jeffrey says, “so that he can have the reverters released and be able to create some, you know, I “guess, create housing on his own on this property.”
The problem with that, Action News Jax found, is the assessed value of many of these properties is far and away cheaper than what they’d go for on the open real estate market.
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Just one of King’s properties, for example, is assessed at just under ten thousand dollars. It’s on the Eastside, a part of town with growing property values and according to Zillow’s estimate the property is actually worth more than $100 thousand dollars.
It’s a great deal for King, especially because once he makes the payment he can do whatever he wants with the parcels and it doesn’t have to be affordable.
Over the phone, Action News Jax asked King, “is your plan to put affordable housing on those properties?” He once again refused to answer the question and quickly got off the call. Action News hasn’t been able to reach him since.
But when it comes to the solution the city’s administration has provided, there are plenty who think it’s a bad deal for the community and an even worse precedent to set for the city.
Ken Amaro, a councilman on the Homeless and Affordable Housing Special Committee, says “it’s a tragedy because the whole purpose is to provide affordable housing, to meet the needs of working folks who can’t even afford to pay the rent where they are, much less get a piece of the American dream owning their own home.”
Councilman Jimmy Peluso says he does not want the city to sell these properties at he assessed values and has met with the administrations to find a way to take sure that doesn’t happen. “The unfortunate thing is,” he says, “for those that hold, I don’t know, 30 properties and now they get the potential opportunity to buy it with pennies on the dollar and then they don’t need to build affordable housing. That’s where things get a little bit, you know, a little bit shaky.
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