Homeless families to get temporary stays in hotels

A new taxpayer-funded program will give the homeless free hotel stays for up to 21 days, beginning next month.

One thousand rooms will be set aside over a three-month period at two Extended Stay America locations in Fort Lauderdale and Tamarac.

They’ll be reserved for homeless families with children, and homeless people who are military veterans. Also eligible will be people who aren’t chronically homeless.

Although some critics question how effective the program will be, its supporters say the initiative is bound to make an

immediate impact.

The new plan differs from previous programs that housed Broward’s homeless in motels, organizers say. This one involves hotel rooms that have been reserved ahead of time, guaranteeing their availability, and a program to get people to graduate to permanent housing.

“It’s about time,” said Laura Hansen, the CEO of Broward’s Coalition to End Homelessness. “It’s something that’s been needed for a long time.”

Experts well-versed on homelessness say hotel stays could be helpful — as long as there’s a plan for when people leave the hotel.

“A shelter or short stay in a hotel is needed for safety in the moment,” said Amy Turk, a social worker with the Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles, which works to help homeless women. “But without a concrete pipeline into something permanent, the individual will likely stay homeless.”

The new program in Broward is being funded with $20,000 by Operation Lift Hope, an organization that receives donations from philanthropists and businesses, in addition to a combined $40,000 in tax dollars contributed by Broward County and Fort Lauderdale.

Extended Stay will give the homeless their own area of the hotel so they aren’t mixed with regular-paying customers, said company spokesman Kevin Axe. This is Extended Stay’s first organized effort to assist the homeless in Florida, he said.

“Part of our company’s culture is we care for our communities,” he said.

He said the company is “looking for better results” than what happened in Massachusetts several years ago, when the hotel chain provided free rooms to the homeless.

There, he said it was a “disaster,” where “the volume exceeded what was planned for” and “it became out of control and hard to manage,” he said. “It needs to be done in doses, in moderation.”

Michael R. Wright, the administrator of Broward County’s Homeless Initiative Partnership, said the program has a multipronged approach. After a hotel chain sets aside discounted rooms, the homeless are then assigned case workers who will encourage permanent housing.

“Putting someone in shelter is not going to do anything,” he said. “You can’t shelter your way out of homelessness.”

Under the program, Fort Lauderdale police will find homeless people with children or who are military veterans, then drive them to one of the two participating Extended Stay hotels, at 5851 N. Andrews Ave. in Fort Lauderdale and 3873 W. Commercial Blvd. in Tamarac.

Beyond hotel stays, program participants also will be fed. Hope South Florida will make arrangements to feed the homeless through its network of churches six nights a week for dinner.

Case workers will evaluate what each participant most needs. That may include a bus pass home if their relatives live out of town, or the financial assistance to get into permanent housing.

“We now know we can house people quickly, rapidly, because we have these [hotel] beds available,” said Ted Greer, the chief executive officer for Hope South Florida, the charity at the forefront of the project. “This gives us assurance there will be beds available every night.”

Not everyone thinks the program is a guaranteed success.

Ron Book, chairman for the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust, said setting aside 1,000 hotel rooms for the homeless sounds “very robust and very expensive.”

His Miami-Dade agency helps homeless families get into hotel rooms if no beds are available in family-oriented parts of shelters. Single folks who are military veterans don’t get hotel stays because there’s plenty of room for single people in shelters, he said.

“You’re in the horns of a dilemma. You want to do the right thing,” Book said. “But the risk is fairly great you get people complacent and happy being in that hotel room.”

In Miami-Dade, two case managers help families get driver’s licenses, apply for jobs and then graduate to permanent housing.

Since the start of the fiscal year, 211 families have been placed in hotels for as long as 100 days. One of eight have graduated to permanent housing so far in Miami-Dade.

Joseph Navas, 23, his wife and infant daughter were among the families that could have benefited from a hotel program in Broward, according to Hope South Florida. After Navas lost his job, he was evicted, he said. The family was forced to sleep in their Volkswagen, often in parking lots at hotels or McDonald’s.

“We literally had no hope,” he said. “We reached out to every shelter and they were full. We were calling, calling. We told them we had a baby and they said, ‘Check with us next week . ... Next week. … Next week.’”

They slept in their car for three months until space at a Pompano Beach shelter opened, he said. Navas said after he called Hope South Florida, they gifted the family a voucher to pay for a security deposit on a Lauderhill apartment and for some of their rent for six months. They are still there, and are now a family of four: That little girl is now 13 months old and they have a son who is 1 month old.

“They’re doing a good deed,” Navas said of the planned program.

Of an estimated 2,450 homeless people in Broward on any given day, more than a third don’t have shelter, according to county studies. About half of those homeless are in the county’s largest city, Fort Lauderdale.

The city has been criticized for its treatment of the homeless. Most recently, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida filed a lawsuit, accusing the city of throwing away homeless residents’ belongings in a raid at a city park.

The hotel program will be a game-changer for the city, said Jeri Pryor, a Fort Lauderdale city spokeswoman, who deals with homeless issues. It will create an immediate solution if police officers come across a “mom with babies” in the middle of the night, Pryor said.

“It’s out-of-the-box thinking,” Pryor said.

Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler, whose city is contributing $20,000 to the program, called it “exactly what we’ve been looking for.”

TAIMY ALVAREZ/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Joseph Navas and his family were among those who could have benefited from a hotel program in Broward.

TAIMY ALVAREZ/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler, left, city commissioners and other officials watch a presentation about housing and the homeless.