More homeless shelters and day centers are needed outside of Orlando, mayor says
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On any given day, hundreds sleep on the streets, in their cars or in enclaves seen and unseen in every pocket of Central Florida, people who track the homeless say.
But the majority of shelters, outreach centers and resources are concentrated within the city of Orlando, and more specifically, the historic Parramore neighborhood just west of downtown. While that area marks Ground Zero of the local homelessness crisis, Orlando’s leaders are saying increasingly that solutions are needed beyond Parramore and outside the borders of the region’s largest city.
This week, the city council voted on a $6 million renovation of the Christian Service Center in the neighborhood, poised to transform it into the city’s first comprehensive day services center with showers, laundry facilities, charging stations and medical services.
Mayor Buddy Dyer hopes the vote will spur other local governments in the area to step up their efforts in the fight, by building smaller similar facilities or opening shelters of their own, and brought the call to a meeting of the Central Florida Commission on Homeless last week, a board made up of some elected officials and business leaders.
“I’m extremely hopeful that this will be a clarion call to other cities, other counties to do likewise because this is a first, but we need a number of, not as large but smaller ones throughout the region and we also need a number of shelter located throughout the region,” Dyer said this week. “We can’t do it just by ourselves just as the City of Orlando.”
Central Florida has seen a 75% increase in unsheltered homelessness dating back to 2019, with a federally mandated Point-in-Time count finding 587 people considered unsheltered in Orange, Seminole and Osceola counties. In Orange County, the count found 331, with a city official estimating about 200 sleep on the city’s streets each night.
Nationwide, there was a 9.7% increase in unsheltered homelessness since last year, according to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, citing data from the January point-in-time counts. The same data shows a 25% rise in newly homeless people, which federal officials say shows the stresses of rising rents on people across America.
Such counts only scratch the surface of the challenge of quantifying homelessness. Many sleep isolated in cars in shopping center parking lots, others in secluded encampments in the woods to evade law enforcement.
There are four emergency shelters for people experiencing homelessness in the three-county area, with three in Parramore and a fourth in Sanford. Also, nonprofits and local governments cover housing costs — including rents, utilities or hotel rates — for about 5,000 people living in the three-county area, according to the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida.
With each city and county battling rising homelessness, it would be beneficial to have numerous small shelters and day centers throughout the region to better serve people closer to where they reside, said Martha Are, the CEO of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida.
“Seminole County has one shelter but they certainly could use more capacity,” she said. “Osceola has been the biggest shelter desert, where there hasn’t been anything. But there’s a significant need out in East Orange County, and out in west Orange County.”
Answers from elsewhere may be coming. Kissimmee city officials purchased a former Super 8 Motel earlier this year, with plans to convert it into an emergency shelter, with social services as well as long-term affordable housing.
And Are said in Apopka, there are discussions about building a day center with overnight beds as well to help address the city’s homelessness challenges.
In east Orange County, Tim McKinney said he’s pitching county leaders on allotting a portion of its nearly $220 million in federal hurricane relief dollars toward shelter and housing. McKinney leads the nonprofit United Global Outreach, which estimates about 1,000 people are unsheltered or precariously housed in wooded areas, sheds and other unsuitable shelters in the fast-growing, but still heavily wooded areas surrounding Bithlo.
“When there is money to pay for rent, they don’t want to leave their community because they’re offered housing on the west side or in Kissimmee,” he said. “There’s next to no permanent supportive housing in east Orange County.”
Under the terms of the federal disaster-recovery dollars, the county can use some to create housing for unsheltered people, as well as possibly shelters, said Mitchell Glasser, manager of housing and community development.
Glasser did not mention shelters for homeless persons Tuesday when he outlined an action plan for the funds during a presentation to Orange County commissioners.
But he noted efforts should prioritize “underserved and vulnerable populations.”
Dyer said the city and county for years have had discussions about repurposing Orange County’s shuttered work-release center on Kaley Street into a shelter. The 209,000-square-foot building previously had dormitory-style housing for up to 308 inmates who held jobs in the community, according to the jail’s website.
“It needs tender love and care to bring it back, but it’s a vacant space and a good location,” Dyer said this week.
Carla Bell Johnson, a deputy county administrator whose responsibilities include oversight of the community and family services department, said the county has had “very preliminary” with city staff about the center.
She said the building has deficiencies in air-conditioning, plumbing and ventilation systems that would have to be upgraded at significant cost before it could be used as a shelter, even temporarily.
As the city council prepared to vote this week on a $6 million renovation, a “think tank” of Parramore residents submitted a list of recommendations to the city council asking for shelter beds to be added in other parts of the city.
Speaking in support of the city’s renovation plan this week, Anna Ashie, president of the Lake Dot Village neighborhood association said she’s had her car and backyard broken into, and people use the restroom in her front yard as unsheltered homelessness has increased.
“Our neighborhood cannot continue to be the primary one bearing the load for the region as is currently and historically been the case,” she said.
