Osceola law targets homeless
Along U.S. Highway 192 in Osceola County, business and government leaders say homeless people have become an “eyesore” — blocking sidewalks, harassing tourists for money and scaring off hotel guests.
So the county commission has taken what homeless advocates consider to be a giant step backward: enacting a new law making it a crime to set up “temporary habitation” along much of the tourism corridor, punishable by up to a $500 fine and 60 days in jail.
That means no pitching tents, no cardboard shanties, no camping out in bus shelters with shopping carts full of one’s worldly belongings.
Supporters claim that arrest will be a last resort. The ordinance, they say, is merely a “tool” to encourage the homeless to move elsewhere, either out of sight or, ideally, into a program that will shelter them and address their potential mental-health and substance-abuse issues — though there is no emergency homeless shelter for men in Osceola County and other housing options there are extremely limited.
“We had to do this,” said Osceola County Commissioner Peggy Choudhry, a former hotelier who now also serves on the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness. “The big picture is that we want them to have a proper home, but the reality is that’s going to take a long time. And in the meantime the tourism industry is the heart of Osceola County’s economy. … Do we want our visitors to say: ‘We don’t want to go there because all it is is homeless people and panhandling’?”
According to a recent county report, tourism supports 40,000 jobs in Osceola and has an economic impact of nearly $5 billion a year.
But critics of the law — including some of
Choudhry’s fellow commissioners — say it’s both unfair to punish people with nowhere to live and that it’s costly and ineffective.
“It’s going to be a revolving door on our jail,” Commissioner Viviana Janer said. “When we see the jail costs mounting and the problem not being solved, we’re going to be twiddling our thumbs in a year or two, wondering what went wrong.”
A national survey of laws that “criminalize” homelessness — by outlawing sleeping in parks, panhandling or “camping” in public — found a 69 percent increase from 2006 to 2016. Bans on camping alone rose 48 percent.
The city of Orlando also has an anti-camping law — one that was challenged in court several years ago but upheld.
“We are hoping that trend will start to reverse itself,” said Eric Tars, senior attorney with the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. “Our goal is to make sure those people are not on the street in the first place. You can either do that in a way that puts more barriers in the way of people getting out of homelessness — that gives them a criminal record and gives them fines and fees that they won’t be able to pay — or you can do it the smart way.”
The smart way, though, means putting money toward homeless programs instead of paying later for more law enforcement and jail cells, he said.
Osceola has long struggled with homeless families who turn to cheap rent-bythe-week hotels for shelter, sometimes for months or even years. But complaints about chronically homeless individuals along the busy U.S. Highway 192 corridor are a separate phenomenon — and they come as the county is working to redevelop the 192 strip to make it more attractive to tourists.
“[A] homeless gentleman … has set up a living room environment on the sidewalk in front of our property,” Wade Michael, general manager of a Quality Suites wrote to county officials in December, saying guests were complaining on their comment cards about the situation. “Our local police department and code enforcement has informed me that there is nothing they can do because he is not in violation of any laws or ordinances!! This eyesore is certainly not conducive to our business.”
Osceola officials have only recently begun to address the underlying issues of homelessness. In the past year, nonprofit organizations there have begun to house chronically homeless individuals who have physical and mental disabilities — just 15 of them so far. More are on a waiting list. According to the latest count, conducted in January, Osceola has 239 homeless people — not including those families living in hotels or doubled up with another family. But 23 percent of the homeless there are veterans, well above the 9 percent in both Orange and Seminole counties.
“Their chronic homeless population is not sizable, but its presence is felt mostly on [Highway] 192,” said Shelley Lauten, CEO of the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness. “It’s a tough situation for them. They know this is a very shortterm strategy, that it is one tool, and not the best tool. … As our research has shown, this recycles people in and out of jails and the court system and doesn’t address the cause.”
In 2014, a study of the region’s homeless found that, on average, a long-term, chronically homeless individual ran up more than $31,000 a year in costs for repeated arrests and jail time, emergency room use and inpatient hospitalization. That was about $20,000 more than simply housing the person would cost.
But it’s not clear yet how often the new ordinance will be used. Osceola County Sheriff Russ Gibson said he would prepare guidelines for his deputies urging “the greatest amount of discretion possible.”
“We’re not going to be out there, hunting people down and looking to arrest everybody,” he said.
And two weeks in, no homeless person has been arrested.
Mary Lee Downey, executive director of the Community Hope Center in Osceola — which offers a variety of resources but no shelter — said she hopes that will continue to be the case.
“It is a frustration for me,” she said. “This is a question we’ve needed to answer for the last 10 years — what to do about our homeless. Honestly, if we aren’t going to provide a shelter in Osceola County, then we need to build more affordable housing and permanent supportive housing.”