Help for homeless families?

Legislation’s aim is to boost permanent housing

Local lawmakers are backing a bill they say will free up millions in state dollars to help homeless families get out of rent-by-the-week motels and into apartments and homes.

“This could have a huge impact on them,” said Florida Rep. Mike Miller, R-Orange County. “Those families have a roof over their heads but they’re trapped — they’re trapped in a motel. And we keep hearing that they just need a little help with security deposits and utility deposits, and then they’ll be on their way.”

Miller is a co-sponsor of the bill with Rep. Jason Brodeur, R-Sanford, and Mike La Rosa, R-St. Cloud. The Senate version is sponsored by Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs, who described the bill’s potential effect as “dramatic.”

“For children, growing up in homelessness is a tragedy,” Simmons said. “And this is a way to help their families help themselves. It’s a different approach than we’ve used in the past.”

The funding would come from an already existing tax on documentary stamps for such things as mortgages, liens, warranty deeds and quit-claim deeds. Currently the money goes into a statewide housing incentive pro-

gram that is divvied up among counties and larger cities to spur homeownership programs.

But the bill would allow local governments to use up to 25 percent of that total for rental assistance to homeless people — roughly $1.18 million this year for Orange and $282,000 for Osceola, the two counties with large numbers of families living in cramped motel rooms. It could go toward security deposits, utility deposits and monthly rent subsidies for up to a year.

If the bill passes, each local city or county would need to create a plan, with input from homeless advocates, on how to use the funding.

The lawmakers are quick to point out that their bill doesn’t raise taxes or force local government to spend it this way, both of which would be politically unpopular. So far, there has been no organized opposition to the legislation.

“This is relieving regulatory burden,” Miller said. “We’re easing the regulations on state funds so that local entities can use it as they see fit.”

Collectively, Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Lake counties and the cities of Orlando and Kissimmee get nearly $11 million from these state funds, meaning about $2.7 million could be funneled into rental assistance for homeless residents in the region.

But Orange County has already dipped into its general revenue pool to offer such assistance, and it’s not clear how quickly county leaders would want to redirect the maximum 25 percent of their state housing funds to the homeless cause as well.

Mitchell Glasser, manager of Orange County Housing and Community Development, said a lot depends on the success of the rental-assistance programs the county has just started.

“This is a great bill,” Glasser said. “But it’s going to take time to put everything into place. But let’s say we have success with getting people out of hotels, out of cars, out of deteriorating, uninhabitable housing and into decent rental housing. Then we’d definitely want to add some of these [new] funds to the pot.”

Local lawmakers all said Central Florida led much of the rest of the state in taking action to house homeless individuals and families and that the bill would nudge others to follow suit.

Andrae Bailey, CEO of the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness, which helped author the bill, agreed. And other provisions in the proposed law, he said, would create a statewide plan for housing the homeless and monitor progress.

“The most important impact to me is that there will be millions freed up and made available to each community to address homelessness, and Tallahassee will start to focus on the Housing First effort statewide. That’s big progress,” Bailey said.

Housing First — the approach to ending homelessness embraced by the federal government — means getting a homeless person into his or her own place first, and then addressing the need for counseling or job training. For years, agencies have done things the other way around.

The legislation also shifts some current funding for low-income housing to “rapid re-housing” — getting people who have just become homeless back into a place of their own quickly so they don’t languish in longterm shelter programs, which researchers said are often ineffective and sometimes harmful to residents’ recovery.

For skeptics, the bill also offers something that should finally end the debate on which approach is best: For the first time, agencies statewide would need to measure

the impact of their programs in getting people off the streets and into stable housing — and keeping them there.

As it is, there is only a once-a-year snapshot of homelessness — the federally mandated point-in-time count of homeless people, this year on Jan. 27 in Central Florida.

“We don’t really have ongoing data of what the homeless population looks like — who’s in it, are we making any progress, are people getting out of homelessness?” said Oscar Anderson, a lobbyist on the issue.

“So we keep counting them once a year, but we don’t know if we’re making any progress.”