Homeless residents endure mayhem on a May day

Beginning with the people who lived there, nobody would have described the homeless encampment adjacent to Stranahan Park in the heart of downtown Fort Lauderdale as an ideal home.

No privacy; belongings stacked on wooden pallets covered with tarps on a 1500-square-foot oblong patch of dirt; no 24-hour access to restrooms or showers; a continual threat of theft and physical violence— gunshots and at least one stabbing had occurred in recent months— and the real emotional violence that comes with the psychic territory of feeling like a misplaced stitch in an otherwise cohesive social fabric. And an infestation of rats, which city officials used as a pretext to shut it all down. No, none of us would call this ideal or desirable or, dare I say, acceptable.

But if home is that place where one has at least some semblance of stability, a sense of community and connection to one’s neighbors, a place— rudimentary as itmay be— to go and hang the proverbial hat, then home thiswas for the several dozens of people who, on the whim of a mayor and city manager, saw themselves evicted fromthat home last Friday afternoon, and their community destroyed.

Therewas nowarning, just the calm of another day, but this time drowned by a human tsunami of Fort Lauderdale Police Department cops, private security, and city Parks and Rec rangers and sanitation workers with a bulldozer and dump truck in tow, all indifferent to the havoc they would wreak.

City Manager Lee Feldman, credited by Mayor Jack Seiler as the plan’s architect during the post-debacle press conference, stood off to the side among some FLPD brass while panicked homeless people, newly dispossessed and retraumatized, wandered to and fro in search of their stuff, or simply not knowing howto cope or what to do. An elderlywoman who’d lost everything sobbed. Mayhem for a May day.

“Seiler said the city is willing to help its homeless but doesn’t want them camping outdoors in the middle of a redeveloping downtown,” the Sun Sentinel noted in its story following Friday’s disaster, paraphrasing a statement the mayor made at a meeting earlier this month.

To be sure, Seiler’s actions over the past eight years have spoken even louder than his often misplaced words, as his administration has passed six ordinances criminalizing homeless folk— five in 2014 alone, including the notorious food sharing ban which made international headlines— and backed a police department which seems to relish its role as their frontline abusers.

Last year, in what retrospectively may be seen as a series of dress rehearsals for Friday’s fiasco, the city began intensively enforcing its “outdoor storage ban,” at times also trashing folks’ belongings as they did lastweek. Such is the “help” the city has repeatedly offered, spun like a mantra as having something to do with improving Fort Lauderdale’s “quality of life.”

Sure, rats are a health hazard, but questions remain to be answered or reframed to gain some clarity on whowas really at fault here.

For example, in light of city leaders’-well-documented desires to rid downtown of homeless people, it behooves us to ask who sicced the Florida Department of Health on the city over the rats, based on which the latter was issued a citation last Tuesday, May 16, which city leaders then used as their justification to demolish the encampment?

Or, take the most hygienic group of people on the planet, set them next to a park which is a breeding ground for rats, let them live there for a fewweeks, let alone months or years without full-time access to restrooms or showers, and wouldn’t they, too, soon be inundated? As one of the evicted homeless men who requested anonymity, a Vietnam vet who grew up here noted, the entire city is overrun by rats!

Last Friday, the ones who scampered around city hall’s 8th floor and city commission chamber were far more in evidence than the ones living in the bushes at Stranahan Park.