Florida House passes bill to prevent homeless people from sleeping in public

Florida House lawmakers handed a bill on Friday that may prevent homeless people from sleeping in public and require native governments to fund homeless camps.

H.B. 1365 handed the Republican-controlled House 82-26 in a close to party-line vote. The laws is supported by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who mentioned it’s a means to “combat homelessness and keep Florida’s streets clean.”

“We’re not going to let Florida become San Francisco where homeless are everywhere,” DeSantis mentioned final week.

The bill would additionally make it simpler for residents and enterprise homeowners to problem native officers over how homelessness is addressed, in accordance to The News Service of Florida.

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Florida House lawmakers handed a bill on Friday that may prevent homeless people from sleeping in public. (Getty Images)

The Florida Senate is anticipated to take up an identical proposal on Monday.

House sponsor Sam Garrison, R, admitted the measure “isn’t going to eliminate homelessness,” however mentioned present initiatives to handle homelessness will not be working.

“This is not a bill designed to put people out of sight, out of mind. It’s quite the opposite,” Garrison mentioned on the House Floor.

Garrison mentioned the purpose is to hold Florida cities from turning into like San Francisco and different U.S. cities with a homelessness disaster.

“The status quo is not acceptable,” he mentioned. “When it gets to a point where the problem exceeds the resources to address it, the cost of dealing with it on the back end is inevitably 10 times what it would be on the front end.”

Florida had the nation’s third-highest homeless inhabitants as of 2022, with almost 26,000 people. That similar yr, San Francisco had a homeless inhabitants of almost 8,000.

For two months through the coronavirus pandemic, Tampa tried to designate a two-month homeless camp for homeless people. City officers advised Fox 35 that it prices roughly $60,000 month-to-month for each 100 homeless people. At about $600 per tent, this prices $720,000 per yr.

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A homeless man sits subsequent to his makeshift shelter on a sidewalk in Miami. (Getty Images)

The bill would bar cities and counties from permitting people to sleep on public property, together with at public buildings and in public rights of means. The proposal would additionally permit native governments to designate sure areas for sleeping or tenting if the places meet requirements established by the Florida Department of Children and Families.

These designated areas would have to embrace restrooms and working water, safety and be alcohol- and drug-free. The websites, which might solely be used for a yr, should additionally not hurt the protection or worth of close by properties.

“With no security, with no basic sanitation, with no access to behavioral health services for folks who have been ravaged by drug abuse and mental illness…the answer is let’s get a home for everybody,” Garrison mentioned. “If we do nothing for these folks, that is unacceptable,”

Rep. Ralph Massullo, R, mentioned the bill would begin to clear up streets whereas on the similar time offering secure shelters and mental-health companies.

“Will you all have to come back here next year and do some more work? Possibly,” Massullo mentioned. “But when the cities aren’t acting, the state needs to, and that’s our responsibility.”

Democrats say that with out state funding to assist the bill, it might enhance native authorities prices and power homeless people into wooded areas.

Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis, D, mentioned the bill makes an attempt to criminalize homelessness whereas “bullying municipalities and counties into doing what we want them to do.”

A bunch of homeless people hold heat with blankets and winter clothes in entrance of a downtown enterprise in Orlando. (Getty Images)

“We must acknowledge that pushing the unhoused out of sight isn’t a solution. It is a failed attempt to sweep a societal problem under the rug,” Bracy Davis mentioned.

Rep. Anna Eskamani, D, mentioned lawmakers ought to prioritize “robust investments in transitional housing and shelters. But no, instead, we want to designate a location that’s probably going to be really hard to identify.”

The bill would additionally present residents and enterprise homeowners with standing to file civil lawsuits in opposition to native governments for permitting unlawful sleeping or tenting on public property.

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Some counties can be exempt from sure necessities beneath the proposal if these necessities would create monetary hardship.

The House rejected a sequence of amendments on Thursday that had been proposed by Democrats, together with banning perpetrators of home violence from being allowed in the designated homeless areas and permitting the areas to stay in place for greater than a yr.