{"id":42824,"date":"2024-03-12T12:24:46","date_gmt":"2024-03-12T16:24:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/?p=42824"},"modified":"2024-03-12T12:40:53","modified_gmt":"2024-03-12T16:40:53","slug":"florida-homeless-crisis-swells-new-bill-set-to-torment-the-unhoused-if-passed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/2024\/03\/12\/florida-homeless-crisis-swells-new-bill-set-to-torment-the-unhoused-if-passed\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida homeless crisis swells: new bill set to torment the unhoused if passed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By\u00a0Palm Beach Post – Editorial<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Florida lawmakers this month legislated a response to homelessness that addressed neither its causes nor results and which will only cause more pain in its failure. The bill, HB 1365<\/a>, essentially orders cities and counties to snatch the homeless off city sidewalks, streets and park benches \u2014 of questionable legality at best \u2014 without providing additional resources to help with social services or housing, the real need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The superficiality of this legislation, which would take effect in October, seems aimed only at assuaging the discomfort of those annoyed by the presence of homeless individuals. The governor should veto it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homelessness is many problems in one: There are homeless veterans, families and children, each with their own causes and challenges. There’s alcoholism, substance abuse, mental illness. And above all, there’s a lack of affordable housing, and high rents that put many of us a paycheck or two away from sleeping on a city bench, in a park or car or under a noisy overpass of an I-95 exit ramp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Diana Stanley, CEO of The Lord’s Place in West Palm Beach, puts it: It’s like, “if you don\u2019t see them, then you don\u2019t have to help them.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to a legislative analysis of the bill, the United States last year had an estimated 7.6 million homeless people, including more than 30,000 in Florida. According to Stanley, roughly 2,500 to 3,000 live in our county.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not like removing the homeless hasn’t been tried. But arresting people for the crime of having nowhere to go has never been a solution, and inevitably further burdens municipalities with the cost of lawsuits. Even the homeless have rights, it turns out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2019, faced with complaints by downtown shopkeepers and neighborhood residents, and after a handful of violent crimes, West Palm Beach went to the trouble of playing cloying children’s songs on a recorded loop 24\/7 to discourage sleeping near the city’s Great Lawn. After a wash of bad publicity, officials stepped up a series of more-humane approaches, from sending outreach teams to link the willing with social services, to help with housing programs, or to provide transit fares to those whose out-of-town families agree to take them in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Palm Beach County, its municipalities, nonprofits like The Lord’s Place and St. Ann’s Place, philanthropists and volunteers have been addressing the problem of homelessness. So it’s not clear why anyone thinks what’s needed is a heavy-handed state law that provides no help \u2014 just an unfunded and unnecessary mandate that localities must prohibit “public camping and public sleeping.” If they wish to designate a location for the homeless to camp, they need state permission and inspections by the Florida Department of Children and Families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The politics behind all this? A tough-guy Governor who says he’s going to keep Florida from turning into another San Francisco. \u201cWe need to prohibit camping on all city streets, sidewalks, and parks,\u201d Gov. Ron DeSantis said. \u201cWe just can\u2019t live like that in Florida.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HB 1365 passed by a vote of 82-26 in the Florida House and 27-12 in the Senate. But if the Governor really wants to help, instead of signing it, he should redouble efforts to fund housing, mental health care and addiction treatment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stanley, who is among those who’ve helped the homeless for decades in Palm Beach County, says, “If you want to make a difference, we have to have financial support to provide all services necessary to empower people to know they have a different purpose in life.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Palm Beach Post – Editorial Florida lawmakers this month legislated a response to homelessness that addressed neither its causes nor results and which will only cause more pain in its failure. The… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"0","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","default_image_id":71799,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[7791],"class_list":["post-42824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial","tag-florida-homeless-crisis-swells-new-bill-set-to-torment-the-unhoused-if-passed"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}