LIFT Jax purchased and renovated this home on Spearing Street on the Eastside in 2025 in order to sell it as an affordable housing property. | Will Brown, Jacksonville Today
Published on October 28, 2026 at 4:43 pm
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Jacksonville City Council members blocked an effort Tuesday to pull nearly $3 million from the newly minted affordable housing trust to pay for a loan for the proposed Tori Meadows apartments.
The $39 million project by developer Vestcor Inc. will be affordable housing, but some city lawmakers appeared caught by surprise that the council’s Finance Committee wanted to pull from the $4.9 million trust fund — intended to help spur affordable single family homebuilding — a month after it was included in the city budget.
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“I have never seen in my seven years here where something passes in the budget, and then two weeks later we’re changing it,” council member Ron Salem said. “That concerns me, just on the surface of doing that …. And I think in particular with the amount of people who got involved in this particular issue, I think it’s a bad look for the council.”
The council did, ultimately, approve Ordinance 2026-0752 but without determining how the city will pay the loan when it’s due in two years.
The bill includes the development agreement with the Vestcor subsidiary Tori Meadows Ltd. for the $2.8 million loan at 1% interest to help finance the affordable multifamily housing project in the Spring Park neighborhood.
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According to documents filed with the legislation, Tori Meadows will have about 180 units and will sit on 8.74 acres at San Diego and Spring Park roads.
Tori Meadows will have 20 years to pay back the loan to the city.
Preserving the trust fund
The debate about using the trust fund money for Tori Meadows started last week when Finance Committee Chair Will Lahnen was adamant about including a funding source for the loan in the bill.
Since taking the chair in July, he’s been warning about adding to the city’s unfunded incentives liability owed to developers in the coming years. The City Council auditor says in the 2028-29 budget year, when the city will have to pay out the Tori Meadows loan, the city already has $35 million in budgeted incentive payments coming due.
“That is my concern. Passing this, we’re now up to $38 million of unfunded financial commitments two years from now,” Lahnen said. “And, again, we have to budget that. So there is going to be some sort of trade-off two years from now.
“I view it as my job, not just as Finance chair, but as an elected official here, to at least bring up that concern,” he said. “If we are not funding it now, we have to find a way to take care of $3 million plus $35 million two years from now.”
Before the final vote Tuesday, the Council defeated a substitute bill that would have used the trust fund money. The vote to approve the loan without funding was 15-3 with Lahnen and council members Mike Gay and Chris Miller voting no. Council member Rory Diamond was absent for the vote.
Getting money approved for the trust was a heavy lift for its supporters during this summer’s city budget process. In July, Mayor Donna Deegan included the $4.9 million line item to create the trust fund in her $2 billion budget proposal. It was stripped during the Finance Committee’s budget review in an effort to eliminate any new city spending.
Council member Matt Carlucci led the effort to get the trust fund put back into the budget with a boost to downpayment assistance in the fund by Salem.
Carlucci criticized the effort to pull money from the trust fund before the programs it supports have been finalized.
“I was not contacted before this change, and the residents who helped us secure this funding had no meaningful opportunity to respond to this diversion before the committee acted,” Carlucci said in an email to Jacksonville Today.
“Families trying to buy a home deserve a helping hand — not a bait and switch,” he said. “We must make room for families who want a home they can own, build equity in and pass on to their children. I intend to fight to keep that promise,“ Carlucci said.
The trust fund will use the money for three things — $2 million for down payment assistance for low-income homebuyers; $1.4 million for capital stack funding to reduce developer costs and home prices; and $1.5 million to pay the fees to connect attainable housing to JEA utility service.
Salem said he understands Lahnen’s concern about approving the loan without a defined way to pay for it. But he says the fund should be used to support owner-occupied housing as opposed to rentals. According to Salem, five of the 600 homeowners who have received city-backed down payment assistance awards in the last five years went into foreclosure.
“That’s a pretty good rate of getting somebody into a home,” Salem said.
Members of the public showed up at City Hall on Tuesday to urge council not to fund Tori Meadows with trust fund dollars.
“It disturbs me that you want to spend that money even before we implement the affordable housing trust fund as planned,” Carole Hawkins said. “An affordable housing trust fund is more than a one-off, case-by-case grant made to a developer for a single apartment project. It will give us a more flexible comprehensive strategy for giving us affordable homes in Jacksonville.”
Making the trust fund official
The Deegan administration is asking the council to make the trust fund an official city program. Before the end of the year, council will consider Ordinance 2026-0858, which would codify the trust fund and establish oversight for the program with the chief of the Housing and Community Development Division.
“Any new funds that come from the projects funded by the trust fund — interest payments, repayments to the city, etc. — will flow back into the trust fund to be used again for affordable housing programs and developments instead of having the funds go back into the general fund,” Joshua Hicks, the city’s affordable housing director, told Jacksonville Today.
Hick says there is also pending legislation, Ordinance 2026-0885, to establish a $200,000 fee for developers who want to expedite permitting and will be used to give the trust fund a recurring revenue source.
The bill would have 10% of the fee go to the affordable housing trust fund while 90% would go to the city’s building inspection fund.
Tori Meadows
Tuesday will not be the last time council will consider public financing for Tori Meadows.
In November, city lawmakers will consider Resolution 2026-0877, which would authorize $31.2 million in multifamily housing revenue bonds awarded by the Jacksonville Housing Finance Authority to get the project built.
Those bonds come from state dollars, and the council has established a precedent approving this type of financing without any debate.
