DeSantis adds homeless people to his enemies list

Don’t think House Bill 1365 was contrived to fix homelessness. This is about ousting the homeless.

The bill awaiting the governor’s signature targets urban homelessness without bothering with the tangle of social, economic, legal and mental health pathologies that have left 31,000 Floridians adrift on city streets.

Rather, HB 1365 provides Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies another vulnerable subset of humanity to malign and mock for fun and political profit.

After savaging LGBT Floridians, immigrants, ex-cons, dreamers and drag queens, they need fresh meat. The Unauthorized Public Camping and Public Sleeping Act adds Florida’s most pitiable demographic to the menu.

DeSantis got to what really matters when he bragged on Fox News that “the far left is really upset” about the notion of corralling the homeless.

Ronnie Ledbetter, a 48-year-old transient who resides on a grassy patch in the vicinity of the Broward County bus depot, said the intent was obvious. “They want to haul us off, make us disappear, stick us in some prison camp.”

On Wednesday, I chatted with a dozen or so of Fort Lauderdale’s homeless by the bus depot and along the Riverwalk. Nearly all said they had heard that rough treatment was coming their way.

Indeed, HB 1365 would roust them from their urban haunts and require city and county governments to do the rousting.

Local governments would be prohibited from “authorizing or otherwise allowing” anyone to “camp or sleep” in parks or sidewalks or other public property.

The word “allowing” must be galling to city and county commissioners who’ve been struggling with the problem for decades. As if without HB 1365, big city liberals would grant transients squatter rights to kiddie playgrounds.

The bill forces local jurisdictions to choose between tossing people in jail or stashing them in tent encampments away from urban centers. With several expensive caveats.

Florida’s new Hoovervilles can’t be located in a residential area. A city or county government must outfit homeless camps with security, water, toilets and access to addiction and mental health services. After a year, the bill requires the local jurisdictions to relocate their homeless camps and repeat the process.

Under HB 1365, the legislature provides the (unfunded) mandate while local governments are stuck with the bills. They call that cosmic balance in Tallahassee.

Fort Lauderdale tried a sad variation of this 31 years ago, when 200 homeless men and women were jammed into a blue-andwhite banquet tent at the western edge of Holiday Park. It became a festering mess of drugs, violence, prostitution and crime. Neighbors and patrons of Parker Playhouse and parents of kids on nearby ballfields complained, convincingly, that the park had become populated with tottering, urinating, defecating drunks.

The city relocated the tent, but conditions hardly improved. “I spent a few nights there and it was hell,” a drifter named Tom Hughes told me in 1993. “It was drugs, drunks, fights and stealing.”

The scenario was awful enough to convince civic leaders to build a $10 million homeless shelter on Northwest Seventh Avenue (which opened in 1999).

Of course, the homeless haven’t disappeared from Fort Lauderdale. Many of them prefer the streets to the county shelter. “People in there are scary,” said Ledbetter. The threat of a $500 fine and 60 days in jail for illicit camping hasn’t chased them away.

In 2014, the city tried buying the homeless one-way bus tickets to elsewhere. Three years later, 10 homeless men whose belongings were destroyed when the city cleared out a rat-infested camp in a downtown park, won a $40,120 civil judgment. Turns out, even tattered transients have constitutional rights.

Fort Lauderdale’s dismal experience ought to have been a warning: Simpleminded, corral’em-in-a-tent solutions won’t fix homelessness.

Affordable housing would help. “I can’t pay rent in this town and have enough to eat. I can’t eat and have enough to pay rent,” Robert Gibson told me Wednesday. After three years of homelessness, the sum of his belongings can be stashed in two Hefty garbage bags.

The Pew Charitable Trust reported last August, “A new analysis of rent prices and homelessness in American cities demonstrates the strong connection between the two: homelessness is high in urban areas where rents are high and homelessness rises when rents rise.”

Zillow reported this week that the medium monthly rent in Fort Lauderdale is $2,950 — $900 above the national medium. The medium in Miami $3,250. Renters in Key West contend with a medium of $5,200.

But instead of building affordable housing, Florida cities and counties have been told there’s another way to deal with the homeless: Round’em up and house them in repurposed circus tents.