The Florida Model misses the point on homelessness
A bill passed by the Florida house bans sleeping in public and encourages cities to build camps for the homeless. The state should try building housing instead.
Last Thursday, I was at a GRACE Marketplace fundraiser. I’m inspired anytime I hear Jon DeCarmine and John Thomas from GRACE speak because those two have done more for homeless people in Gainesville than almost anyone in the last 10 years. Because of the efforts of the team at GRACE, homelessness was reduced by 40% in Alachua County and over 1,000,000 meals have been served to people in need. 1,000,000 meals is incredible! And GRACE has had success because the team there correctly believes the solution to homelessness is to provide people with a home first and foremost. A lot of folks could learn a lot about how to help people in need by watching what GRACE Marketplace does.
Florida’s state government has a different idea about how to reduce homelessness. It’s an old one, even though it’s been given the seemingly important sounding name of the Florida Model. Most people would recognize it by its original title: out of sight, out of mind. In purporting to help the homeless, the state wants to make it illegal for people to sleep on the street while at the same time encouraging cities and counties to set up homeless camps to better administer services. Get rid of the visible homeless and move them to camps away from businesses. This is at best a band-aid, making homelessness less visible while doing nothing to address the root causes of homelessness: low wages and high housing costs.
Though I disagree with the proposal, I can see where the state is coming from here. Visible homelessness is rising in Florida, as it is in a lot of places, following rising housing costs and the end of the pandemic-related government issued benefits. A large concentrated homeless population can discourage people from visiting nearby businesses, which was reportedly the case in Gainesville.
As an aside, yes, in a big way, Joe Manchin is responsible for a rise in homelessness by insisting that the expanded child income tax credit not be permanent. That one tax credit expansion went a long way to slashing the federal poverty rate by doing something novel: the government paid parents money each month with no strings attached and no hoops to jump through to get that money.
Another novel way to help solve homelessness would be to provide people with homes. No hoops to jump through, no strings attached, giving people a safe place to live not just because it’s the humane thing to do, but because it’s also the smart thing to do for the national, state, and local economies. Humane because housing is a human right. Everyone deserves a home. Smart because homelessness costs billions in dollars in tax money to support people and more in lost potential economic activity.
To their credit, the Alachua County Commission is doing some good work in bringing more permanent supportive housing services online. And to their credit, the Gainesville City Commission recently redirected $700,000 to support more beds at GRACE Marketplace. Both of these efforts will help people in need in a real way. But we need more if we’re really going to make a big dent in homelessness, even just locally.
Gainesville and Alachua County do not have the kind of money needed to end homelessness on their own. But the state of Florida does1. Instead of continuing to slash taxes on the wealthy and corporations, the state could use those tax dollars to build public housing. Rents and home prices in Gainesville have gone up2 significantly over the last few years. Local municipalities could do their part to encourage more housing development by eliminating a lot of the arbitrary zoning restrictions we have across various cities and counties in Florida. More housing supply would help stabilize the housing market, which in turn would have the effect of making sure some people don’t end up homeless to start.
High housing costs are one side to homelessness. Low wages are the other side. Minimum wage in Florida is currently $12 per hour and is set to increase to $15 per hour by 2026, by which time it’ll be way too low to live off of because $15 per hour is already well below a living wage in Florida. The state could also pour resources into our education system and stay out of dictating curriculum and instead work to make the state more attractive for more graduating students to stay here and work to attract a more diverse base of industry. Creating more job opportunities is yet another approach here, albeit one that is really only effective with creating conditions for wage growth.
A couple of things I haven’t addressed that often come up in conversations about homelessness are mental health and addiction issues. Homelessness is first and foremost a housing issue. If people don’t have a stable place to live, there’s almost no way they’ll be able to get lasting help with mental health and addiction issues. Housing first approaches have been proven to work.
Pay people money, build more public housing, lower housing costs by encouraging more housing diversity by private developers. If we want to be serious about helping people and ending homelessness, these are the things that work. This is what the Florida Model should be.
I’m highlighting Florida’s shortcomings, but obvious the federal government could also end homelessness if Washington ever decided to make it a priority. A robust public housing program on a national level would go a long way here.
As another aside, some folks in Gainesville amazingly still don’t believe we’re in a housing crisis. Look on the streets. Look downtown. Look on the Waldo Road Trail. Look on University Ave. Look on Archer Road. Look on NW 16th Street. Look almost anywhere in Gainesville, and you will see people sleeping on the streets because they cannot afford to be in a home and the shelters are full. Those people are either incredibly naive or cynical because they have benefitted financially from a housing shortage by seeing their own home values rise.