Will new year, new law bring new trouble for Orlando's homeless?

ORLANDO, Fla. — A sliver of pavement under an I-4 overpass is the place a half dozen unsheltered men call home.

They sleep in a group to look out for each other’s safety and ensure their few belongings aren’t stolen. Each night they arrive at sunset, and they usually are unbothered by law enforcement until about 5:45 a.m., when police sirens act as an alarm clock.

“They just want us up and out of here early in the morning, cause the bigwigs and everyone come by to go to work, and they don’t want to see us laying here,” said Mark Jarrett, one of the older homeless men in the group, who had a wheelchair.

Those live-and-let-live interactions may change starting Jan. 1, when the teeth of Florida’s new law governing homelessness are finally bared. Technically the law’s requirement for local camping bans took effect on Oct. 1. But not until the New Year does it become enforceable, as residents, businesses, and Florida’s attorney general gain the power to sue local governments that don’t clear encampments within five business days of receiving a complaint, collecting attorney fees and damages for their trouble.

Will 2025 bring a flurry of roundups, cleaning up messy overnight spots on sidewalks and in parks? Will unhoused people who can’t find space in Central Florida’s scarce shelters get carted off to jail? Or will the year bring a variation on business as usual, as leaders continue to lament the problem of homelessness but avoid drastic and costly measures to deal with it?

“Everyone is just waiting for that first lawsuit to drop,” said Eric Gray, the executive director of the Christian Service Center, which provides aid to the area’s homeless from its campus in Orlando’s Parramore neighborhood. “Maybe nobody files a lawsuit and it’s much ado about nothing. Or maybe somebody wins a $10,000 judgment against Duval County and it’s off to the races with attorneys across the state.”

Jarrett was a union worker who built sets at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. He said he lost his job amid health problems, and then his wife died in 2020, which provoked his descent into homelessness.

“Go ahead and take me to jail,” he said. “They got beds. They got food.”

Daniel Butler, 59, has been sleeping outside for two years. He has autism and other learning disabilities, he said, which make it difficult for him to maintain steady employment. He works a temporary job as a holiday bell ringer for the Salvation Army. After his shifts, he returns to the sidewalk with the group of men.

“It’s a chance we got to take because where are we going to go? Are they going to put all of us in jail?” Butler said. “When they release us from jail, we’ll just go right back to where we started from. And what, they’re going to give us a record for doing nothing?”

Butler’s dilemma is the reason some law enforcement leaders resist the idea of arresting those who sleep in public places come January.

Among them is Orlando Police Chief Eric Smith, who formed a specialized homeless intervention unit about a year ago in hopes of controlling the high numbers of calls to his agency related to people experiencing homelessness. The unit is staffed with 11 officers and six mental health counselors who respond across the city.

Primarily, he said, the unit tries to connect unsheltered people with resources or just moves them along if they are panhandling or on private property. From January to November, Smith said the unit has had 26,500 interactions and made 541 arrests.

Typically, the arrests involve other crimes, Smith said, including municipal code violations like public urination and carrying open containers of alcohol, but also more serious offenses involving drugs or outstanding warrants.

“If you look at the stats and the arrests we make … we’re arresting those people who violate the law not for being homeless or anything like that,” he said.

Such interactions are driven by complaints, he said. While Smith’s officers know where the homeless gather, they typically don’t respond if no one is being bothered, he said.

“Now it’s going to be interesting because starting Jan. 1 you can sue the city,” he said. “If you call in and say ‘hey, there’s 50 homeless people under I-4 at this overpass’ we have to respond.”

Smith’s observations aside, data shows that arrests for municipal violations have increased sharply across Central Florida in recent years, even before the new state law was signed, according to Andrew Sullivan, a UCF researcher on homelessness issues.

He said prior to 2023, about five people per day were arrested for low-level offenses typically committed by the unhoused. Since then the number has spiked to between eight and 15 per day. Of those, between 60% and 70% are experiencing homelessness, Sullivan’s research found. Most of those are in Orlando.

Orange County hasn’t yet banned public camping, as the state law requires, leading the county sheriff’s office to tell the Orlando Sentinel it currently has no basis to arrest people for sleeping in public places. Commissioners are scheduled to take a vote on such a ban on Jan. 7, a county spokesperson said.

In Seminole, which recently signed off on a ban that explicitly authorizes officers to arrest public-property campers for trespassing on a second offense, [the sheriff’s office said its deputies are prioritizing “problem-solving, compassion, and practical assistance over immediate enforcement measures.”

Central Florida’s homelessness crisis remains a math problem. A federally mandated count of the region’s homeless population last January found 2,883 people considered homeless – including those who sleep in cars and in shelters. Of those, 1,201 in Orange, Seminole and Osceola counties sleep outside — though some number of others evade attention and remain uncounted.

Those same three counties have 709 shelter beds for the general population – Orange has 590, Seminole has 119 and Osceola has none. Some 500-plus more beds are also available for segments of the population, such as domestic violence survivors, those rescued from human trafficking or LGBTQ youth, according to the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida.

Little progress has been made in expanding shelter capacity since the law was enacted last spring.

Orlando, which already provides most of the region’s accommodations, is the furthest along. It is advancing plans to use Orange County’s former Work-Release Center on Kaley St. as what is called a “low-barrier shelter” – meaning it would be open to almost everyone in need, regardless of whether they have a criminal record, or even identification. It still needs various approvals to move forward, and likely wouldn’t be ready until the end of 2025 at the earliest.

“They have to provide a safe place for us to be at. And they haven’t even begun to do that,” said Willie Brown, an older man who has been experiencing chronic homelessness. On a cold Friday evening in December, he said he tried getting into a shelter but was told all the beds were full. So, he tucked himself inside a sleeping bag on the ground under an I-4 overpass and played a few games of chess on his phone before falling asleep.

Orange County has set aside money to find potential shelters in the east and west ends of the county, though no locations have been made public. Local leaders are also having talks about setting up a so-called homeless court as a diversion to avoid arrests, though that too is months away at best.

Still, in an area which moved slowly prior to the pressure from the state, the activity feels like progress.

“We’ve had more conversations about shelter in this community in the past six months than we have had in the past 60 years,” said Gray of the Christian Service Center.

The root cause of homelessness locally, as elsewhere, is high housing costs and a lack of affordable units combined with stagnant wages, advocates say. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Orlando is about $2,100 a month, according to Rent.com. In 2019, the average rent for that same apartment was $1,264.

Chris Ham, the executive director of Rescue Outreach Mission in Sanford, Seminole’s only shelter, said for many employed people, a two-bedroom apartment would eat up about half of their income. Families who pay more than a third of their income on housing are considered cost-burdened.

“Rent is $1,800-2,000 a month for a two-bedroom,” Ham said. “If you’re a single mother or a single father and you’re a schoolteacher, your income is $51,000 a year…The solution is more affordable, attainable housing. I think we must get creative with some of our zoning and our land use codes.”

Back on Orlando’s streets, Jeff Castner said his only hope for housing is to get disability income, though so far he’s been unsuccessful. Health issues cost him his job as a union machinist, he said. Then it cost him his home, leading him to a spot under the overpass.

He’s also found a hideout elsewhere in case he needs to avoid arrest.

“I got an emergency spot, where I won’t get busted at all. It’s windy and cold. You wake up in the morning, you got dew all over you,” Castner said.

But at least, he said, he won’t have to go to jail.

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