Florida may be waking up
You can sleep in your car if it’s legally parked but not inside a tent on public property.
Of course, it’s highly unlikely that most homeless people have access to a vehicle, unusual as this excluding wrinkle — as in exception to — is, under a new bill just passed by the Florida Senate, which will take effect on Oct. 1.
Thousands of homeless humans will be prevented from setting up camp or dossing down in public places — parks, underpasses, government-owned scrubland — once Gov. Ron DeSantis signs the bill. And he will sign it. The former Republican presidential candidate — until he got obliterated by the buzz saw known as D. Trump — pimped the bill a couple of weeks ago at a Miami Beach appearance, standing at a podium that bore the placard: “Don’t Allow Florida To Become San Francisco.”
No American city wants to turn into San Francisco … or Portland … or even Seattle, all metropolises held up as cautionary tales for urban decay and homeless-driven squalor, blame laid at the feet of lefty municipal politicians.
The same can’t really be said of Toronto’s metastasizing problem of the unhoused — a blight that predates the ardently lefty new mayor and a predominantly left-leaning council. No city, or smaller town for that matter, has figured out a way to simultaneously alleviate the homeless need and neighbourhoods aggrieved by encampments, which sometimes spark criminal activity. Vancouver, Prince George, Calgary, Regina, Kingston and Montreal all conducted eviction operations last year, with varying degrees of dismay from activists. Toronto got smacked across the head, too, by the city ombudsman over the manner in which Lamport Stadium Park was dismantled in 2021.
It’s an immensely difficult problem to solve even incrementally, simultaneously with providing alternate accommodation and transitioning services. Meanwhile, encampment fires have taken lives. And frankly, this is no way to live for anybody, on the ragtag edges.
In Florida, the legislation was driven by a Republican-dominated senate that will take decision-making away from local governments, many of which are more progressive-minded. It’s not entirely heartless, though, the bill. While banning the unhoused from most dug-in barnacles, it also “urges” local politicians to create designated homeless camps, while offering security, sanitation and access to mental health services. At those designated locations — the argument that consolidating the unhoused in a single cantonment would make it easier to address their needs — use of alcohol or illegal drugs would be prohibited. And just try policing that.
The bill’s sponsor, Fort Myers Republican state senator Jonathan Martin, said: “We as a legislature are doing our part to right the ship and provide housing safety and services for our homeless population of Florida. It’s my hope that, with the passage of this bill, local governments will step up and do the right thing to address the homeless crisis in their own communities with the tools this bill provides.” Passing the buck, in other words. Martin said about 30,000 people in the Sunshine State don’t have a home and about half of them are without any shelter. Opponents counter the bill is simply a means to gather up the unhoused and push them out of public view.
“This bill does not and it will not address the more pressing and root causes of homelessness,” said Democratic state senator Shevrin Jones, as reported by the Tallahassee Democrat. “We are literally reshuffling the visibility of unhoused individuals with no exit strategy for people who are experiencing homelessness.”
The bill is specific about defining even a one-person encampment: Erection of a single tent or other temporary shelter, presence of bedding or pillows and storage of personal belongings. While there are no actual penalties (fines) targeting the vulnerable population, the measure would allow local residents, businesses and the state’s attorneygeneral to sue local governments that don’t follow the restrictions.
Though the legislation passed easily on a 27-12 vote, there are indications Floridians are actually growing weary of the sharply conservative DeSantis bent, and even more so his avenging “war on woke.” Among the proposals that bit the dust before the senate session concluded last week: Bills that would have banned rainbow flags from public buildings and likewise banned the removal of Confederate monuments. Also tipped into the legislation graveyard was a law that would have required transgender people to use their sex assigned at birth on driver’s licenses, and rejection of an attempt to forbid local and state government officials from daring to use transgender people’s preferred pronouns.
Particularly impressive in a state that has been ground zero for America’s culture wars, has one of the strictest abortion laws in the U.S. and outlawed teaching critical race theory, was the pushback by parents against aggressive book bans in school libraries. No state has banished more books than Florida. A sample of titles that have been deep-sixed in various counties: Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale,” Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” “Flowers For Algernon,” “Water For Elephants,” “Where the Crawdads Sing,” “The Kite Runner,” “American Psycho” and “Call Me By Your Name.”
Moms for Books, the conservative outfit that infiltrated the school system, leading the charge to ban books about sexuality and gender, was taken down a peg by the countering Moms for Libros which opposed censorship, particularly infuriated when a biography of salsa singer Celia Cruz was removed from library shelves.
Further chipping away at the governor’s woe-is-woke bill of fare is cancellation of some key DeSantisbranded laws, most notably his “Stop Woke Act,” foundation for scuttling critical race theory education. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled last week that the law, passed in 2022, “exceeds the bounds” of the Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression.
Significantly in taking the pulse of the state, the Florida GOP — which has featured platform brawls between supporters of DeSantis and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump — is the fact that the party has lost two local races they were expected to win: A runoff last year for mayor of Jacksonville and a flipped seat in January by Orlando Democrat Tom Keen, whose opponent had vowed to fight “the woke agenda.”
But arguably the most compelling obstacle to the DeSantis docket has been Republican senate president Kathleen Passidomo, who’s halted several culture war bills from advancing, including the aforementioned ban on toppling Confederate memorials. As the Washington Post reported, an individual who strongly supported that specific bill at Senate hearings said he wanted to protect Confederate statues to “push White culture, white supremacy.” Even Republicans on the committee were appalled. Said Passidomo: “I’m not going to bring a bill to the floor that is so abhorrent to everybody.”
There are still reasonable Republicans in the U.S. who don’t worship at the altar of DeSantis or, even more alarmingly and unfathomably, Trump.
Pity they’re in the minority.