COVID aside, we need a vaccine for city leaders’ indifference to homeless
Barely two months after Miami’s ill-conceived effort to evict homeless people from an Overtown encampment during the COVID pandemic, the city is back with a new initiative that would traumatize the homeless in the midst of an escalating public health and economic crisis.
This time, city commissioners set their sights on church groups and charities that feed unhoused people. Miami recently passed a law that requires anyone who seeks to feed 25 or more homeless people (including the servers) to get an permit in advance each and every time they want to serve food to the homeless.
Only one charitable group is now allowed to serve food, once a day, within one of five city parking lot “feeding locations” in downtown Miami; and it can get only one permit per week — first come, first served. The so-called “Large Group Feeding” regulation, scheduled to take effect in July, also lets the city manager change these designated feeding locations at any time without notice or coordination with the various agencies that are tasked with homelessness services and outreach.
Let’s not mince words: The Large Group Feeding law is an astonishingly cruel and callous effort to effectively ban feeding the homeless throughout the entire city. Given widespread and unprecedented food scarcity caused by the coronavirus pandemic, it is likely that all food servers would attract 25 or more hungry homeless people whenever they sought to feed the poor. And all such food servers, therefore, would be banned from serving food at Miami’s homeless encampments.
By limiting food service to one meal a day to homeless groups, the law would create a humanitarian crisis of hunger among Miami’s most vulnerable residents condemned by poverty to live on city streets.
Worse, this law particularly hurts the majority Black and disabled residents of Miami’s Overtown homeless encampments. Most of these encampments, located far from the downtown feeding lots, have more than 25 residents who cannot travel because of disabilities or would not travel for fear of abandoning their possessions. For those who do manage to trek to these downtown lots, the law appears to undermine city and county efforts to ban gatherings of large groups.
In this era of George Floyd, when communities nationwide are reconsidering the inappropriate use of police to address social problems, Miami would double down and require public safety officials to monitor and penalize charities that feed homeless people. The Large Group Feeding law marks a low point of the city’s slide to its bad old days of criminalizing homelessness.
Apparently anticipating a public-relations debacle, Miami City Commissioner Manolo Reyes recently wrote a Miami Herald op-ed that characterizes the Large Group Feeding law as an opportunity to protect public health and increase services to the homeless. But Miami could protect public health by placing well-maintained handwashing stations and trash receptacles at homeless encampments, rather than imposing burdensome requirements on charities.
And conspicuously absent from Reyes’ op-ed is any mention that the law slaps fines up to
$500 on anyone who tries to feed groups of homeless persons at encampments. These penalties would violate charities’ First Amendment right to deliver religious and political messages to the homeless and will likely entangle Miami in unnecessary lawsuits.
Particularly disappointing is the position of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust. It supports the Large Group Feeding
Law based on the misguided belief that the homeless must be made uncomfortable to compel them to accept shelter. The fallacy of this belief is contained in the assumption that people choose to be homeless. However, research demonstrates that no one is homeless by choice; rather, people are homeless because they lack choices.
It is inexplicable why the Homeless Trust would use hunger as a weapon to compel homeless people to “accept” services when there are insufficient resources to house or shelter all the homeless.
Indeed, Miami leaders appear intent on following Fort Lauderdale’s dubious example when, several years ago, that city embarrassed itself on the international stage by arresting a 90-year-old man for feeding homeless persons.
Reports that the Miami director of human services is now visiting homeless encampments in a Mercedes-Benz to warn charities not to feed the poor paints an unflattering portrait of Miami as heartless city, hostile to its poorest residents.
We likely will develop a vaccine that will end the coronavirus pandemic. But it will be far more difficult to inoculate Miami’s leaders against their callous indifference to the plight of the homeless.