DESANTISLAND

Florida homeless law: Orlando Sentinel survey shows cities and counties making scant progress

Ryan Gillespie
Orlando Sentinel (TNS)

Central Florida leaders are on the hunt for more shelter beds for people who sleep on sidewalks, under highway overpasses and in the woods. But with less than three weeks until a new state homelessness law goes into effect, they’re not making progress nearly as quickly as that law suggests they should.

The Orlando Sentinel surveyed numerous local governments across the region over the past week, asking how they plan to comply with the state’s mandate to adopt and enforce camping bans in public spaces by Oct. 1. Local leaders have acknowledged that means the region will need many more shelter beds. But few of the city and county officials who responded to the Sentinel’s inquiry as yet have concrete plans to build them.


Siting shelters remains difficult, with a planned open-access shelter running into a buzz saw of opposition last week in Orlando, which already is home to most of the region’s facilities and services for the homeless. And that creates a conundrum because without beds to offer, local governments will come under pressure to arrest those sleeping outside. For now, officials responding to the Sentinel survey expressed little inclination to make such arrests.


In Orange County alone, 759 people slept outside on a single night in January, with half of those residing in the downtown Orlando area, according to this year’s point-in-time homeless count. That number is expected to climb. The region’s roughly 1,100 shelter beds are full every night, and the bulk of them are in Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood, west of I-4.

“We know we need hundreds” more beds, said Martha Are, the CEO of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida. “Realistically we probably need a thousand.”

The new law does allow counties to put such beds in special permanent encampments as well as shelters — but the rules for such encampments are strict and costly, and no Central Florida government has said they have plans for such a setup.

Besides Orlando, Orange County has the firmest plans to move forward of any agency responding to the Sentinel. This week, county leaders added $10 million in funding to homeless agencies to its upcoming budget, Mayor Jerry Demings said. Those new dollars are expected to bolster efforts to fund additional shelter beds, in locations as yet unidentified but ideally on the east and west end of the county, where a sizable number of people sleep in encampments in the woods.


In an interview, Demings said he tasked the county’s real estate office to look for potential shelter sites in areas that won’t impact neighborhoods.

“I suspect that through contracted services it may be multiple shelters that we’ll be housing those to fill in the gap,” he said. “We’ll come out soon with a very detailed plan.”

Demings equivocated, however, when asked about a specific idea favored by city leaders to repurpose the county-owned Work-Release Center just south of downtown Orlando into a shelter.

An Orlando official pitched the county last year on temporarily using it as a shelter while the Salvation Army Men’s Shelter and the Christian Service Center’s day services center were under renovation. Ultimately, the two sides didn’t move forward with that plan due to the expense of the necessary renovations. But the two governments have also had talks about using it as a longer-term solution.

“It was designed as a correctional facility, not as a shelter,” Demings said. “Yes, there’s space there. Is it the best space, the most appropriate place? We’re still evaluating that.”

Orlando has had its own trouble finding a new site for a shelter. Earlier this month, city leaders revealed a proposal to invest $7.5 million into a 24-hour low-barrier shelter in West Lakes, with 250 beds. The city intended to enter a lease, and potentially purchase a 21,000-square-foot building on West Washington Street, which they considered to have the bones of an ideal shelter.

However, neighborhood outcry led to the apparent shelving of the plan.

“We’ve heard the residents loud and clear and we continue to look elsewhere,” said Lisa Portelli, a senior adviser on homelessness to Mayor Buddy Dyer.


Dyer for more than a year has called on the region to get more aggressive in finding shelter space outside of his city’s limits. Of the regions roughly 1,167 beds, nearly 1,000 of them are in Parramore. The latest proposed shelter, while outside of the neighborhood, is only a few blocks west of it.

“If the City of Orlando is baring the burden of most of the Central Florida region, it feels like the city is saying ‘District 5, we’re appointing you to be the area that bears the burden on behalf of the city, which is bearing the burden on behalf of the region,” said Keeyon Upkins, who lives nearby.


Dyer said it is time for Orange, Seminole and Osceola counties to more aggressively pursue shelters rather than just rely on the city’s capacity.

“We call it a regional approach … but it always ends up being a city approach,” he said. “Everybody is not just downtown in Parramore. There are people in east Orange County, west Orange County, and Osceola County, which I know have major issues along the 192 corridor.”

The Sentinel’s survey suggests Dyer’s wish for efforts beyond Orlando will not soon come true. The vast majority of other cities responding said they don’t intend to build shelter beds.

For example, in Seminole County, Altamonte Springs City Manager Frank Martz said he believes the county should take the lead on shelter discussions.

“Since all city residents are also county residents and pay the same county taxes that those living outside of cities, a resident living in a city shouldn’t have to fund this twice or should we create multiple housing authorities,” he said in an email. “We don’t have that expertise. Therefore, we believe this should be a county-wide initiative and we have encouraged that discussion.”


Seminole County officials didn’t answer questions about their plan.

In Osceola County, where there are no general population shelter beds, there are few signs that county leaders are on the verge of changing that. That county also didn’t respond to the Sentinel’s survey questions.

Will Cooper, the Chief Operating Officer of The Hope Partnership, said Osceola County has had representatives at meetings of a regional task force to build open-access shelters, but he hasn’t heard of a plan to construct one there.

“I have not heard any talk from the county level about funding or creating any sort of emergency shelter,” he said. “I think if we’re going to be a true regional response, then each jurisdiction in the region needs access to services. … I do think Osceola County needs shelter and can’t just rely on the City of Orlando’s shelter capacity.”

Many local officials expect Jan. 1 to be the day when the law’s impacts become more understood: At that point, the law allows residents, businesses and the state’s attorney general to file lawsuits against governments who don’t clear makeshift encampments within five days of a complaint.

Without available shelter beds for the people who reside in those encampments, it’s not clear where they could be taken other than to jail. Orange County leaders this week also discussed creating a “homeless court,” which could provide an alternative to jailing people perhaps by sending them to drop-in locations, Spectrum News 13 reported.

But Demings said local leaders who are part of a task force grappling with the enforcement issue — including police, prosecutors and the chief judge — have said they don’t support arresting people for being homeless.


“Here our sheriffs and our police chief … have committed that they won’t simply arrest people who are homeless,” he said. “Who they will arrest are people who may be homeless and commit crimes.”

(Natalia Jaramillo, Martin Comas and Stephen Hudak of the Sentinel staff contributed.)

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