The City of Corona has boarded up their owned properties and allowed the homeless to move in. Over the last 2 years, 6 large fires have been started in city-owned properties in the Corona Mail area. Many believe allowing the homeless to squat in city-owned properties to be an intentional tactic by the City of Corona. Why isn’t the city providing security for their properties? It is the belief of your intrepid blogger and many on the ground in Corona that the city government is intentionally blighting the area and working to decrease property values in the Downtown so they can buy up real estate and try to turn it for a profit.

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The above is an example of what the city owned properties look like in the Corona Mall. This was once a retail area with 40 businesses that was designated for redevlopment. With properties being boarded up and no security, it has been an invitation for the homeless to go squat in the locations. As we all know, homeless squatting in buildings leads to campfires in said buildings – perhaps exactly what the Jacob Ellis / Justin Tucker / Chad Willardson leadership of Corona want (Aka the Doctors of Destruction)? The only thing missing from this insane chain of events would be evidence that they used some of the now $5MM a year (triple what it was) homeless budget to pay those folks to set fires in the buildings!

Here’s a recent wrinkle.

At a recent Corona City Council meeting, they dropped $1.4 million they don’t have on hiring an “On Call” architect. Why did they need to do this? In light of all the grandiose projects that Dr’s of Destruction are leading the City of Corona into, it is possible they violated state laws (which I don’t agree with by the way, but they are the law), regarding housing development.

With Jacob Ellis at the helm, the Corona Mall (and other areas) have turned into a city owned property allowing the homeless to thrive. The City of Corona has turned off all maintenance, which is easy to prove. Worse, it looks like they have scared and/or bullied private owners to sell at a fraction of fair value with the threat of eminent domain.

Why? Is it so that the Ellis/Tucker/Willardson crew can build their utopian centrally planned hallucination of a mixed use development? (Which Ellis originally sold to the council as an entertainment district?) The problem now is that the city council has realized they may not have properly followed state housing law and must build affordable low income housing! Given what they have done, they are painted in to a corner and are limited with the retail and commercial uses that are allowed on the property. It looks like this is now turning into an Anahiem 2.0 which landed elected officials there in jail and long lengthy lawsuits against that city.

Jacob Ellis, in a recent council meeting danced around the question of low income housing saying they don’t have a clear answer from the state on what can be done. But he did snap at anyone that asked him any tough questions, as the scrutiny of his rampage is clearly starting to get to him.

What we do know is that the city has agreed to spend $1.4M of tax payer dollars to hire an architect to design a project on city owned property, in addition to the property being used as homeless camps that are burnt with alarming frequency. Worse, these utopian projects may never be built or if built may be in violation of state housing law and the surplus land act – yet one by one the buildings they muscled people out of burn.

No other city buys land, designs it and then tries to find a developer. It’s backwards.  Why would a city hire an architect to design a project? Do they have a developer they are already working with behind closed doors? Some believe this is the case, but it can’t be proven just yet.

And it gets worse, to be continued…