A friend asked me how a place like San Francisco could afford paying black people so much money for reparations. The answer is, the city is paying the equivalent of it. The payment is in rent for a house that is supposedly so much a month. While the city waits to come back, they can claim all their neighborhoods are still super priced and they did all this good stuff for black people. Then, the politicians keep most of the money because they're paying themselves for the rent. The house hasn't sold or been rented in months, the city makes an offer or a court order, and the owner just gives up.
It's a great trick, and only backfires when it's the full neighborhood, and no one is willing to move out.
We can see the same for Homeless Housing. Build up a bunch of houses that can only house a few, but pay rent to yourselves for the house. Profit. Then complain you need more for all the other tent cities. Then claim all the organizations that do take care of homeless people are evil racist homophobes who should be destroyed. I watched it happen in Seattle.
There's also investment and architecture firms that want to take out low income housing and build big expensive parking and highrises. What happened in Seattle is now happening in Florida. Ironically the best method to keep out the investors and greedy city council has been calling them racist. There's an entire section of Orlando that has remained because of the traditional black neighborhoods in it. All of the bellyaching that it could help has fallen on deaf ears because many of the older folks remember similar tricks from their youth.
So there, now you know what is happening with reparations. It's a money laundering schemes.
It's never going to happen.
conspiracy theories about money pretty much always involve people with a poor understanding of how things work making the wrong assumptions about how the system works, and imagine that it is super easy to "game", even for someone like them with 0 experience and a wild imagination. No offense to OP, but this kind of speculation doesn't help anything.
The $5 million idea floated was for a lump sum payment. Look it up. There are 100+ ideas for "reparations" and that one was the craziest so it got the most headlines.
The city does not own housing to rent out, and can't seize private property without paying fair market value for it after long and expensive court battles.
The politicians don't own the housing, so no.
Not how this works at all. The limited land in SF means everything in there is priced at high premiums. No owners are "giving up" anything. Look up the dude who has fought for years to convert his laundromat into housing if you want to see how corrupt the local government is, but they can't just do as they please.
The main corrupt thing the local govt does is block new housing projects over NIMBY shit.