Steve Shiver in the News!, by gimleteye

The Miami Herald has taken years to get around to Steve Shiver. Miami New Times offers the best archive of Shiver's questionable record.

In February 2001 Steve Shiver was appointed to county manager by then-Mayor Alex Penelas. It was rumored that Shiver had been rewarded with the top job for his role as pit bull on the Penelas plan to take the Homestead Air Force Base and convert it to a private, commercial airport to benefit campaign contributors. Shiver, also, was the complaint agent of zoning and permitting sought by local bankers and production home builders in the fastest growing area of the county.

As such, he was a ringleader of the local component of the busted Ponzi scheme that shattered investor confidence in securitized debt.

Local media, mostly small newspapers, missed the story entirely; devoted to realtors and the Chamber of Commerce. The interest of local blogs like Homesteadishome, if not the US Department of Justice, is opening a window on South Dade corruption at last.

Prior to supervising the county's multi-billion dollar budget, Shiver had run a small business and, while mayor of Homestead wielded a majority of city commissioners like an axe.

"...Penelas was asked why he chose someone with such limited administrative experience. "I thought bringing someone from the outside who would take a new, bolder, fresher look at the way we run the government would be healthy for this government," Penalas told Miami Today, at the time.

Shiver's tenure as county manager represented the worst deformation of government to do the bidding of land speculators, real estate flippers, and the lobbyist culture of the Growth Machine.

This note is relevant to the story that appeared in this week's Homestead Neighbors Section of the paper, and editorialized by Herald staff. Sadly, the Herald fails to add appropriate color and connect-the-dots to the real estate boom and bust, as one tract after another was plowed under from growing crops to platted subdivisions, destroying the character of Florida's last rural area.

It is not as though Herald editorial writers are unaware of Shiver's position in the constellation of crappy development politics in Miami Dade.

If the Herald had been honest with the public about the doomed model of growth through sprawl, if the Herald had educated readers about the nature of interests that Alex Penelas really represented, if the Herald had been an honest power broker with its editorial page--calling the rampant overdevelopment of South Dade exactly what it was: a disaster--then the politics that pushed Shiver forward might have been blunted.

Instead, the Herald has been hyper-sensitive to loony commercial interests in South Dade-- to the point of killing critical investigative pieces.

In his 2001 announcement, Penelas said, "Mr. Shiver brings to this job a unique combination of skills. He is a successful businessman with a strong and diverse municipal background."

Back in the day, Shiver gave an interview (May 15, 2003, Center for Digital Government) that concluded: "When I was going into college I knew that I was going to be a performer. I had been in a Miami boy's choir for six or seven years, and I was a performing artist. I knew for a fact that was what I was going to do. My degree when I started college was music and performance, but I quickly changed my major to finance and real estate and urban analysis. I changed quickly when I realized I wasn't going to be the next pop singer on the chart."

Shiver, fired from his job in 2003, is also not going to be the next developer of affordable housing in Homestead with the unique combination of skills:

"Mr. Shiver's company bought the 4.3-acre property and 11 other lots for $1.5 million in 2004. At the time, the buildings were occupied by renters. Mr. Shiver then presented the Homestead Community Redevelopment Agency with a plan to find a developer to tear down the houses and build affordable housing. In a deal with the CRA in November 2004, Mr. Shiver was paid a $400-a-month subsidy for two years for each unit that was vacant or became vacant.

The subsidies were intended to help a would-be developer avoid paying the costs of relocating tenants when the time came to demolish existing units. The thinking was that building affordable homes on the site might entail using federal housing programs, some of which require builders to pay relocation costs.

Then-CRA Director Rick Stauts took the subsidy deal to the City Council. Some council members expressed reservations, but in the end it was approved. At the time, Mr. Shiver was often lobbying the council on behalf of developers he represented as a consultant, which may explain why some Homestead officials were queasy about going into a partnership with him.

What the deal amounted to was that for every tenant Mr. Shiver's company evicted, the company would get paid by the city. In all, the Homestead CRA paid him $310,000 in rent subsidies.

But neither the city nor Mr. Shiver could find a developer...

Then Mr. Stauts (who resigned last year) had another bright idea. He persuaded the council to buy the remaining property from Mr. Shiver for $1.9 million plus $54,572 for property taxes and closing costs. The latter expenses usually are paid by the seller. Mr. Shiver claims that he didn't make a cent off this arrangement... Today, what the city owns is a property filled with vacant, crime-luring, dilapidated buildings."

The elevation of Shiver had subsidiary effects. During his tenure, lobbyists were given full understanding that it was open-hunting season on county environmental and land use agencies. The demoralization of county staff, as a result, was severe and it paralleled the effects of a Shiver friend, Jeb Bush, on the environment and land use at the state level. (None of these observations, of course, followed Alex Penelas on his quixotic campaign for the US Senate, as though Floridians would not recall his role in the botched 2000 presidential election recount. Maybe in the fullness of time, Penelas is ready to discuss why, exactly, he chose the moment of the Miami-Dade ballot recount to travel 'on a business trip' to Spain.)

In fact, it is a bloody miracle that there are competent and qualified county staff willing to take the abuse that is dished out, on any given day, by managers dedicated to the theatrics of political survival as Natacha Seijas waves around her queenly wand, despite the presence or perhaps because of the presence of George Burgess.

If there is any silver lining in the housing market crash, it is that reality works like the backwash operation of a swimming pool filter.

Along that line, today's report about default notices in Las Vegas on a 12,000 unit development partnership between Toll Brothers, Lennar and others is the kind of news that should make Herald executives perk up. (There are no full page real estate advertisements of big production homebuilders, for the first time in a long time, in Friday's real estate advertisement section...)

Hope springs eternal. On the other hand, it is taking a vicious implosion of the Florida growth model to get a word in edge-wise.

South Dade, that the housing market bust would lay to waste in just a few short years, is a prime example of the greed and fraud underlying the dominant development pattern of Florida--the political landscape of the state that leads the nation in mortgage fraud.




Posted on Tue, Mar. 11, 2008
Land purchase fraught with problems

BY REBECCA DELLAGLORIA
This ghost town haunts the taxpayers of Homestead.
Forty-five city-owned shotgun houses and duplexes, almost all of them emptied of their former tenants, sit on a stretch of patchy grass at the city's southwest edge, awaiting long-promised redevelopment into affordable homes.

But it's been nearly 3 ½ years since the city began investing in this place -- to date, Homestead has spent more than $2.2 million -- with no new construction, nor demolition.

The city paid $1.9 million to buy the 4.2-acre property last year from a company run by former Homestead Mayor Steve Shiver. The purchase came only after the city had paid Shiver's company rent subsidies totaling $310,000 over two years -- not to keep the units affordable but to keep them empty. Some tenants left on their own; others were evicted.

Shiver, who served as Miami-Dade County manager from 2001 to 2003, said in an interview that the city did well on the deal -- and that he didn't. He bought the land in 2004 to help redevelop it out of civic duty, he said.

''I love Homestead. This is where I'm from,'' he said.

Shiver said he couldn't determine whether he made any money on the sale -- in part because the subsidy didn't cover all his mortgage payments and other costs, like insurance and maintenance. Records show his company purchased the property and 11 other lots nearby for $1.5 million. In addition to the $1.9 million for the 4.2 acres, Shiver also sold 10 of the separate lots -- six to the city for $56,286 and four others to a private buyer for $225,000.

But if Homestead did well in buying the land, it has yet to do much else: The city has no real plan for how to improve the boarded-up homes.

It does, however, have a controversy on its hands.

''It smelled like a bad deal from the start, and it was a bad deal all the way to the finish,'' said Mayor Lynda Bell, who as a councilwoman opposed the subsidy and the subsequent land purchase. Bell was swept into office in November with a slew of newcomers to the council, all opposed to the shotgun-house deal. One incumbent was unseated; two others opted not to seek reelection.

The man who handled the deal for the city -- Rick Stauts, former director of the city's Community Redevelopment Agency -- was forced out last year, partly because of backlash from the deal.

'SHOTGUN' NICKNAME

Long and narrow, each house has three rooms and a bathroom. If you fired a shot through the front door, it would pass through each room and out the back. Hence the ''shotgun'' nickname.

The small cluster of houses was built in 1942 and owned by the Brooker family to house black workers in the days of segregation. By 2004, it had fallen into disrepair and was a hot spot for crime when the CRA targeted the area for redevelopment.

Former Mayor Roscoe Warren said the city's black community pushed for the work. ''I agreed with them . . . that we could do better as a city,'' he said.

In June, 2004, Shiver said, he was driving around Homestead when he saw that the property was for sale. But the sellers told him they already had a prospective buyer.

Antonio Hernandez of Medallion Investments was set to close on the land that July. He planned to keep the units as rentals.

City officials, including Stauts, asked him to submit a plan for redeveloping the land with public aid, Hernandez recalled. He proposed building up to 200 rental units, with the city carrying construction costs.

And to make the deal work, he asked for a rent subsidy, records show.

''If you buy a property with the idea of redeveloping, and you empty it out for a year, you need to be compensated for it,'' he said in an interview.

But the city didn't like Hernandez's plan; ultimately, he lost his financing and backed out. He chuckled when he learned Shiver ended up with the land -- and a subsidy.

''It's amazing, isn't it?'' he asked. ``They may have even gotten the idea from me.''

Stauts said he thought the idea came up in discussions with the property's former owners. He said he didn't recall talking to Hernandez.

''I'm not saying it didn't happen. I just don't remember it,'' he said.

Shiver worked out a deal with the land's owners, Homestead Acres 866, that gave him control of the company. And Stauts worked out a deal with Shiver.

The CRA would pay the company a $400-a-month subsidy for each of the units that were vacant or became vacant for two years. Shiver was to find a developer to build affordable housing.

Stauts told the City Council that awarding the subsidy would help any developer avoid paying to relocate tenants -- costs that would be required under some federal programs he and Shiver wanted to tap to help pay for the redevelopment. Relocation costs would have made it harder to keep the housing affordably priced.

Not every council member bought the idea.

''It just eats at my very soul that this kind of scheme would even come before this council,'' then-Vice Mayor Steve Losner said at the time.

City Manager Mike Shehadeh, then the deputy manager, said he wanted safeguards put in place, but his suggestions were ignored.

''Where does it say if he doesn't build in two years, the money would go back to the city? I wanted that spelled out in the agreement,'' he said.

Shiver's company evicted tenants who Shiver said owed back rent -- some thousands of dollars. In all, nine tenants were evicted after Shiver took control, records show. Seven others were evicted just prior.

Initially, Stauts estimated that the subsidy deal, which was signed Nov. 15, 2004, would total no more than $230,400. That figure grew to $310,000, after more units became empty than initially anticipated, records show.

Stauts signed off on increased subsidy payments, beginning in January 2006, without seeking council approval. He said the city was contractually obligated to pay for all the vacant units. But Mayor Bell said the council should have been told.

''We found out at the back end,'' she said.

Meanwhile, the reason for the subsidy -- avoiding rules attached to federal funds that would have required paying to relocate the tenants -- never materialized.

To date, the project has received no federal funds.

SEARCH FOR FUNDING

City leaders made a fruitless search for other sources of public money:

• Stauts asked the county's Department of Community and Economic Development but was told that the city would not be eligible for money from that department, said Owen Torres, a Miami-Dade County spokesman.

• In December 2005, then-Mayor Warren asked County Commissioner Dennis Moss to help get $3.5 million in county money to put 85 town houses on the property. Moss responded that Homestead would have to apply for funding, as any other fund-seeker would.

''Everybody wanted to see the property razed, the shotgun houses to go away and to have decent affordable housing go up in its place. I supported it then and I support it today,'' Moss said. ``But there is a process.''

• In November 2006, Stauts asked the county's Office of Capital Improvements for money. He estimated the need at $3.4 million for the land; $17 million for building.

Roger Hernstadt, the former capital improvements director, said of Homestead's inquiries: ``There was relatively little substance.''

Shiver had a similar lack of success finding public and private partners. ''We, for months, tried to get the county to come down and look at this project,'' he said.

By the end of 2006, it got tougher.

The real estate market began to collapse, and the county housing agency was in a scandal -- developers were paid millions for housing they never built. In time, the federal government took over the agency.

The city's rental subsidy ran out late that year, and Shiver had no redevelopment deal in place -- and no rent from the empty units.

Once again, Stauts approached the Homestead Council with an idea: have the CRA buy the land from Shiver's company for $1.9 million, plus $54,572 worth of property taxes and closing costs normally paid by the seller.

The council's approval in June 2007 helped Shiver out of a jam.

For eight months, without subsidies, Shiver says, ``I almost went bankrupt, and everybody forgets that. They don't care to think about it.''

Today, the place still awaits its revival.

Homeless people use the shade of Dade County Pine for shelter and make their beds on ground littered with condom wrappers, beer bottles and stained T-shirts.

Some of the shacks have been disassembled by thieves. They pry off metal bars, tear through wooden panels and smash windows in search of copper wire and pipes and aluminum window frames.

ONE LAST TENANT

One tenant remains.

Last week, Emma Ward, 84 -- a gentle lady with shocks of white hair on her head and chin who always had visitors come by to look after her -- was relocated by the city to an apartment just a block north of her old home. She had lived in the shotgun houses for more than 15 years.

''If I could stay here, I'd like to stay here,'' said ''Ms. Emma'' shortly before moving.

The same goes for Asolene Harris, 56, the last remaining shotgun tenant.

Still, it's the city's job now to relocate Harris, as it has Ward and three other former tenants. City leaders still haven't decided just what to do with the property, but the CRA has one immediate goal: to ready the houses for demolition.

Former tenant Shamekia Harrell, 29, who moved out with her five children in September 2005, said she's glad Homestead bought the place.

''The city should have stepped in a long time ago,'' she said, ``and took over those units . . . because nobody should have to live like they were living.''



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