Poverty, Planning & Politics

Three organizations just backed five homeless individuals in filing a class-action lawsuit against the City of St. Petersburg on behalf of all of the homeless people living in the city. The three organizations are the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, the Southern Legal Counsel, and Florida Institutional Legal Services. The reasons for the law suit include a number of city ordinances that have been passed in the past couple years.

These ordinances make it illegal for people to rest or sleep in public places, to use any sort of temporary shelter (such as a tent) in public, or to have over a certain amount of personal possessions next to you in public. In other words, these ordinances make criminals out of homeless people just for being homeless unless they never sleep, they never seek shelter, and they never accumulate too many blankets or extra clothes.

To put it as respectfully as I possibly can, these are some of the most disgusting ordinances I have ever heard of being enforced in present-day America. Housing planners and housing planning students may want to study St. Petersburg as a good example of what not to do.

So he knew that people would find it outrageous and unconstitutional, but Mr. Winn figured out a clever way to word it so that it would hold up in court anyway. Wow, what a smart guy. Now if he could just use that big brain of his to figure out why 1,700 people in St. Petersburg are homeless in the first place and why he thinks making them all criminals is going to help.

Now, I could go on for a few pages about why it's inhumane and pretty heartless to send police out to slash homeless peoples' tents, to arrest homeless people for sleeping in public, or to limit the amount of possessions that they can have next to them. But I think that Mayor Rick Baker and the St. Petersburg City Council members have probably each already found their own way to justify it to themselves. So, instead of writing more about why the ordinances are morally wrong, I'm going to write about why they're stupid.

First off, the only way that these ordinances could make any sense as a way to lower homelessness in St. Petersburg is if the lawmakers are assuming people want to be homeless. In other words, they could be thinking "You know, life just isn't crappy enough for homeless people on the streets. If we start making life even harder for them, maybe they'll finally get a job and buy a house." I know that it sounds like I'm building a straw man and you may be thinking that no one actually thinks that way these days. Well, I would have thought so too, but then I read some of the comments under a story about this on an online version of the St. Pete Times here.

One of them, from Fred in St. Petersburg reads as follows:

Another from Billy in Pinellas Park reads as follows:

I'd like to see Fred or Billy here try being homeless for a week in St. Petersburg, and see if they still feel the same way. When did people start losing every single ounce of compassion for fellow human beings? Some of them suggested that the homeless people in St. Petersburg could just go to Pinellas Hope if they wanted to. But if they had read my recent post, they would have realized that the Pinellas County government just cut all of its funding for Pinellas Hope. Plus, Pinellas Hope only had a maximum capacity of 300, which they were very close to meeting already anyway, and there are roughly 1,700 homeless people in St. Petersburg.

Anyway, to think that 1,700 people are homeless in St. Petersburg because they want to be is the biggest excuse for inaction that I've ever heard. I'm sure they just love being out on the street for every minute of every day, unable to shower, constantly being shouted at with insults, constantly worrying if teenagers are going to steal their stuff while they're asleep. Yeah, it really sounds like a sweet deal.

On another point, the act of criminalizing the homeless through these ordinances is only going to expand the problem of homelessness in the city. How so? Because if it was already hard to get a job when you've been homeless for a certain amount of time without any social capital or links to information about new job postings, it is going to be even harder to get a job now that you have a criminal record as well for sleeping in public. So what will happen? The homeless people in St. Petersburg will all gain criminal records and will become even less likely to be hired and escape from homelessness. Instead of the amount of homeless people being a relatively steady number that fluctuates slightly as new people leave or enter homelessness, it will become a constantly growing number as more people become homeless but almost no people are able to escape homelessness. So the city is basically trying to put out a fire by blowing on it.

On even another point, these ordinances make it so that the criminal justice system in St. Petersburg has to waste funds unnecessarily on arresting homeless people all the time. It will be much more expensive to have police officers arrest homeless people and then keep them locked up in jail then it would be to simply zone for homeless shelters downtown and either pay for their construction and upkeep or contract the service out to a homeless advocacy organization. Plus, if police officers are spending time arresting homeless people for being homeless, then we either have to pay additional taxes to expand the police force, or the city is going to become much less safe because police resources are being directed away from stopping actual criminals committing actual crimes.

So, in the end, even if you do believe that people just love being homeless, these ordinances are only going to lead to one of two scenarios based on whether or not the police force is expanded. One scenario is that there will be more homeless people and higher taxes, because the police force, who's time is not cheap, is going to have to be constantly arresting and jailing homeless people, and this increase in services is going to cost a lot of money (tax money), and the criminal records will lead to homeless people being homeless for a lot longer. Or, scenario two, if the police force is not expanded, then homelessness will rise for the same reason, but instead of taxes going up, crime will go up, because the police force will be moving resources from more important things to making sure that the homeless are arrested.

It's as if the Mayor and the City Council literally did not think about the consequences of these ordinances at all. Rick Baker may think that it's politically smart for him to be heartless towards the homeless after reading comments from people like Fred and Billy (quoted above), but we need for our city's actions to be practical, not political. 

I think that the Mayor and the City Council should do the right thing and build some homeless shelters downtown. There are plenty of empty buildings on high-density commercial zones that St. Petersburg's planning department could have re-zoned for homeless shelters. And I think that you should let the Mayor know. Please e-mail Rick Baker at mayor@stpete.org to let him know that simply building homeless shelters downtown is a much better option than using our tax money to criminalize the homeless.

Thanks for reading.

- David