A Florida law that criminalizes sleeping in public spaces and will take effect next month is expected to provoke a “tsunami of lawsuits” but do nothing to alleviate the state’s homelessness crisis, the mayor of Fort Lauderdale has warned.
Dean Trantalis says his city is scrambling to find a way of complying with the bill signed by the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, in March, and which becomes law on 1 October, requiring municipalities with insufficient shelter capacity to establish encampments for unhoused persons.
A contentious meeting of the Fort Lauderdale city commission last week heard a range of suggestions ranging from camps in the parking lot of David Beckham’s soccer stadium or the roof of city hall, to providing one-way bus tickets for the unhoused to travel to other states. But commissioners did not take any action.
“The city is at an impasse because while the state has handed all the communities this draconian mandate, it failed to provide a remedy to partner with us in which to fulfill their expectations,” he said of the public camping bill.
“We’re doing our best to try to address it. We’ve staffed our police department, our civilian homeless outreach program, we’ve doubled it this past year, because we feel it’s a priority. But the mandate from the state is an onerous burden.”
Figures show the number of unsheltered people in Fort Lauderdale almost doubled from 2022 to 2023, contributing to an 18.5% increase in homelessness in Florida, and a national spike of 12%.
Trantalis said he feared money currently used for services and supports for the homeless would be lost when a clause of DeSantis’s law takes effect in January. That clause allows legal action against any municipality that fails to curb rough sleeping.
“Any private citizen can sue if the city fails to remedy an encampment situation,” he said. “This is going to be a cottage industry for a whole new level of lawyers who feel they could take money out of the city instead of applying it towards helping the homeless.
“This is going to be a tsunami of lawsuits that’s going to hit all the cities, and again, will it benefit the homeless? Of course not.”
Advocates for the unhoused have expressed similar fears.
Diana Stanley, chief executive of The Lord’s Place, one of Palm Beach county’s largest homeless shelters, told the Guardian in March that the bill places the financial and logistical burden for accommodation solely on municipalities and counties, then exposes them to significant financial penalties if they fail to deliver.
“We should be coming together to come up with solutions, not taking punitive approaches,” she said.
Trantalis said the city had also not received the expected level of cooperation from law enforcement, or the court system, in establishing a protocol for handling those who sleep in public after the law takes effect.
Last week, Gregory Tony, the Broward county sheriff, wrote a forthright opinion piece in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel declaring he had instructed jail deputies to reject persons brought in for “municipal ordinance violations”.
“Homelessness is not a crime, and the county jail system is not a solution to the homeless crisis,” Tony wrote. “Arrest and jail are not options this community can afford or that a homeless person deserves. We can do better.”
Trantalis, however, said that was not what was intended.
“We had talked about bringing people into the court system, and putting them in jail not to criminalize them, but to give them shelter and to bring social services to those in need,” he said.
“We didn’t intend for them to have a criminal record. The jail system is a quick and ready accommodation to take people off the streets and put them in a safe place while they are going through addiction treatment, mental health services, whatever it is that these folks need in order to bring them out of homelessness.”
Ron Book, chair of the Miami-Dade Homeless Trust that implements the county’s homelessness plan prioritizing the acquisition and renovation of affordable housing over shelters, said he welcomed the discourse the law had prompted.
“What I found hopeful was that we were, for the first time in over 30 years, having a real dialog on how to address homelessness. And while the encampment law, as it was proposed, clearly had flaws, I believe the sponsors did listen to us, [and] made some changes,” he said.
“[But] I don’t support encampments. They are a bad idea and do nothing on the broader scale to end homelessness.”
Legal experts who have studied the Florida law, meanwhile, see elements of it as a power grab by the state.
Stephen Schnably, professor of law at the University of Miami, and author of a 2020 research paper on homeless encampments, said: “It seems to be intended to take the policy question of whether to arrest people who are homeless for doing something like sleeping or ‘camping’ in public away from local governments and put it at the state level.
“But the problem is, if this is supposedly going to solve homelessness, it’s not really providing state funding towards it,” he said, adding that the bill doesn’t solve homelessness and instead makes a “political point out of it.”
He continued: “If the state were serious, it also wouldn’t be holding this sword of Damocles over local governments with the lawsuits, there’d be a comprehensive plan.”
Schnably also pointed out that encampments for the homeless did not work.
“Where could they be? You have requirements that only the county could approve. They can only last for a year, they can’t be near a residential area. Putting it out in the middle of nowhere and then moving it after a year is just not workable,” he said.
“For people who are homeless and working, you can’t do that when you’re off in some isolated encampment. If I was in a city attorney’s office, I’d be grappling too with if it really means we have to arrest or threaten to arrest every single person who’s homeless and sleeping in the streets? Maybe not, because is that authorizing or allowing?”
