Public Camping Law is More Theater than Solution

A new Florida law that Gov. Ron DeSantis touted as a way to prevent Florida from becoming San Francisco looks like another stunt geared more toward the press conference than the actual policy.

“HB 1365: Unauthorized Public Camping and Public Sleeping” makes it illegal for counties and municipalities to allow individuals and families to sleep or camp on public property. The law does not prescribe what local governments are to do about homelessness beyond authorizing them to set up a homeless encampment on public property that does not abut residential development.

Under this law, the responsibility for enforcement falls not on the state but on local residents and business owners. They, along with the Attorney General, are empowered to sue the county or municipality if it fails to comply. This raises questions about the law's fairness and the potential for politically driven misuse.

There is no question that homelessness, which spiked in the wake of COVID-19, has become an epidemic in the U.S., with more than 600,000 people currently on the streets nationwide. There is also no question that California’s approach has been an abject failure. That said, nothing about this law suggests that it will accomplish anything more than saddling local communities with more unfunded mandates.

One mistake that is too often made is to look at homelessness in a monolithic sense. There are generally three distinct groups of people who experience homelessness. Because the causes are very different, effective solutions will also require varied responses.

An enormous portion of the homeless population is comprised of people suffering from untreated mental illness, most notably schizophrenia. The gutting of state mental hospitals that began a half-century ago is directly responsible for much of today’s homeless population. Until we reinvest in institutions to house those suffering from persistent mental illness and without adequate family support/resources, we will be regularly confronted with the challenges associated with such people unsuccessfully attempting to navigate a society that continues to become more and more complex.

Unfortunately, many of these individuals are not candidates for outpatient support services. In many cases, the only way they will experience a humane existence in which they can be prevented from being a danger to themselves and others is to be institutionalized. This is an expensive proposition because, as previous experience has taught us, cutting corners on cost may succeed in the latter at the expense of the former.

If you work with the homeless over time and in the same community, you will quickly learn that it is rarely a matter of people falling in and out of homelessness because of financial hardships or personal tragedies. You are far more likely to see the same faces year after year. When you look at crimes committed by the homeless, again, you will too often see endless rap sheets associated with a small number of perpetually homeless repeat offenders, many of whom abuse alcohol and/or drugs.

Addiction has long been a major driver of homelessness. When it comes to addiction, we tend to think largely of opioids and opiates such as fentanyl and heroin. However, it has been my experience in working with the homeless and speaking with law enforcement and healthcare professionals while covering the issue that Chronic Alcohol Abuse Disorder is the far more common driver of persistent homelessness, especially in our community.

Unfortunately, many chronically homeless individuals surrender to their addictions and accept being unsheltered as necessary to maintain that lifestyle. This is obviously unhealthy on an individual level, but it is also unhealthy on a societal level. Tensions are sure to mount when those who are participating in civil society—working, paying income and property taxes, and maintaining their property and the community as a whole—have their quality of life impeded by those who are refusing to pay into that civil society while still draining considerable resources from it.

We can be empathetic to the challenges that such individuals face without forcing the people in their community to accept such inequity in the social contract. Rather than telling communities to set up homeless encampments, the state should be using its ever-swelling budget resources to create more viable solutions.

We used to have vagrancy laws that were often used in conjunction with work camps. Creating a live-in, recovery-focused work-farm system similar to those used in county jails as a way for such individuals to enter recovery more effectively could be a viable solution. The work farms could even be adjacent to and support the state mental institutions with operations to provide food, as well as other resources such as clothing, mattresses, etc., the way the jails do. This would greatly reduce the cost of both operations while providing the addicts with wrap-around services (addiction counseling, support groups, and therapy) that could be housed in the hospitals.

In the past, I’ve written about the false narrative that homelessness in cities is largely owed to the cost of living and an individual or family slipping into it after a few unexpected financial hardships. However, our current affordable housing crisis has seen such circumstances rise from anomalies to a measurable portion of the homeless population.

While still far behind mental illness and addiction, post-COVID inflation, years of depressed housing stock caused by the pandemic, soaring rents, and, most of all, private equity and hedge funds gobbling up housing inventory have seen this sector grow at an alarming rate. Until we get serious at all levels of government about creating and maintaining an adequate supply of affordable workforce housing, this sector will continue to grow into a larger share of the homeless population. What's more, a complete lack of affordable rent also reduces the opportunities for chronic addicts who do succeed in their recovery to reintegrate into society successfully.

It is at least somewhat encouraging to see that Florida legislators are doing more than simply ignoring this persistent crisis. However, preventing homeless encampments by essentially mandating homeless encampments is not the answer.

There is much to critique in California’s approach and the results it has yielded, but that state has been tackling the problem in earnest for much longer than Florida has. If we are to learn from its efforts, the lesson might be that the issue is far more diverse and complex than we would like to imagine.

Normalizing homelessness while futilely attempting a housing-first approach has been a failure, but simply criminalizing it while attempting a housing-never philosophy seems no more likely to bear fruit.

Dennis "Mitch" Maley is an editor and columnist for The Bradenton Times and the host of our weekly podcast. With over two decades of experience as a journalist, he has covered Manatee County government since 2010. He is a graduate of Shippensburg University and later served as a Captain in the U.S. Army. Click here for his bio. His 2016 short story collection, Casting Shadows, was recently reissued and is available here.