When Diana Stanley and her team at The Lord’s Place, one of Palm Beach county’s largest and longest-established homelessness charities, opened a new engagement center last year, she figured a few dozen people would show up in search of help.
Now, almost 200 people a day are relying on the facility just for lunch. Staff are overwhelmed by the demand for residential accommodation from families, veterans and the elderly in particular.
“There’s no question there’s an increase in homelessness,” Stanley, the organization’s chief executive, said, her anecdotal evidence supporting a federal study published in December reflecting a 12% rise in just one year of people lacking permanent sheltered accommodation nationally.
“We’re seeing more and more families experiencing homelessness for the first time. And I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the older adults, later in life, losing housing due to affordability, and being homeless at an age of 60 plus. It’s not a good situation right now.”
And things could be about to get much worse, Stanley and numerous other advocates for the unhoused warn. That variable relies on Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signing an “inhumane” bill currently on his desk that seeks to sweep the state’s sizable unhoused community from public view.
The new law will require counties and municipalities without sufficient existing capacity to establish homeless camps, with state oversight, far away from more prominent facilities such as parks and waterfront spaces, and impose penalties if they allow or authorize rough sleeping outside of them.
Equally concerning to critics is that there is no mention of increased funding for substance abuse and mental health treatment promised by DeSantis when he promoted legislative proposals to “combat homelessness” in a February press release. It has fueled suspicion that the true intent of the law is to hide the problem rather than try to tackle it.
“True to form, DeSantis didn’t offer a palette of humane solutions,” the veteran social justice advocate Barrington Salmon wrote in an opinion essay for the Florida Bulldog.
“He spoke of the issue in stark, unsympathetic terms characterizing homelessness in purely negative terms, blaming them for contributing to the erosion of the quality of life of others lucky to not be sleeping on the street.”
Stanley, whose organization housed more than 430 individuals and families in residential homes and shelters last year, and offered support and resources to hundreds more, concurs.
“We should be coming together to come up with solutions, not taking punitive approaches,” she said.
“It’s really disheartening for someone like myself, who’s given over 40 years to serving the poor and the homeless, and it’s a statement that we’ve stopped caring about our brothers and sisters: ‘If we can’t see them then we don’t have to help them’.”
Stanley says the “vagueness” of the law is another clue to its purpose. The bill’s wording insists it “fulfills an important state interest of ensuring the health, safety, welfare, quality of life, and aesthetics of Florida communities”, and makes “adequate provision for the homeless population of the state”.
Notably, it places the financial and logistical burden of setting up accommodation solely on municipalities and counties. It also offers few specifics other than the camps can operate for only up to a year, must have restrooms and running water, and cannot depress surrounding property values.
“There are too many uncertainties, too many gray areas, and it does absolutely nothing to address the root cause of homelessness, the lack of affordable housing,” said Stanley, who fears it will create further pressure on already limited shelter accommodation.
“When Covid happened money came down from the feds and the state to help with rental assistance, but that drying up, coupled with a lack of affordable housing, is going to equal homelessness.
“No family decides on a Friday night, ‘You know what? We’re just going to go out and camp out on the street,’ so it’s hard not to see this bill as a direct attack on those experiencing homelessness.”
One of its Republican sponsors, state senator Jonathan Martin, insisted it was a safety issue, and that his bill was sympathetic to unhoused persons.
“Insufficient shelter beds and insufficient permanent housing solutions result in unsheltered sleeping and camping in public places, places that we want our kids and grandkids to enjoy, like the parks,” he told a Florida Senate hearing earlier this month.
“This bill is a compassionate response to the shortage of shelters and supportive housing by providing an alternative to sleeping in the streets.”
Martin also said Florida’s 2024 state budget included $30m in new grants for local municipalities to provide mental health and substance abuse services, and short and longer-term shelters.
Other experts see the bill as a criminalization of homelessness, and taking away funds that are sorely needed to address such services.
“It’s telling jurisdictions they’re going to have to build these encampments, they’ll have to provide security facilities, wraparound services, the encampments can’t impact property values, so I’m not sure where they’re going to be,” said Amy Donley, professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida, and co-author of the book Poor and Homeless in the Sunshine State.
“But all of it, if jurisdictions want to comply with the law, requires funds to be put there, and those funds right now are already being taxed with the increase in people experiencing homelessness, many of them for the first time.”
Donley also points to places where sanctioned encampments have failed, such as Dignity Village, a city-operated tented camp in Gainesville that was originally intended to accommodate more than 350 unhoused persons, but was closed and dismantled in 2020 amid growing problems with violence, theft and drugs.
“Having jurisdictions focus on building these encampments instead of increasing housing demonstrates a lack of understanding of the problem,” she said.
“I work with a shelter with families qualified for rapid rehousing, but there’s just nothing available. If they could move into affordable housing, that would free up room for people currently on the street. So that’s where the focus should be, helping people into housing, not encampments.”
