When homelessness coincides with Miami elections, living on the street suddenly is a crime | Editorial

The “anti-camping” ordinance heading for a second vote at the Miami City Commission Thursday is the wrong solution for a problem that has bedeviled the city for decades.

The ordinance, which the commission discussed last month before its initial vote, would prohibit encampments on public property and in entryways. It would give police officers the authority to arrest homeless people, as long as they’d been offered a shelter bed. Encampments are defined broadly — any tent or temporary living structure for human habitation, the accumulation of three cubic feet of personal property, even the use of a camping stove or other heating device.

Critics say the ordinance essentially criminalizes homelessness. We agree. We don’t think Miami should become known as a city lacking compassion for those less fortunate.

Putting people in jail is expensive, too — it costs Miami-Dade County about $636,000 a day to warehouse an average of 2,400 people with serious mental illnesses, many of them homeless. Plus, there are other potential solutions in the works.

We understand that it can be disturbing or scary to walk down a street lined with tents or smelling of urine. Business owners shouldn’t be put in the position of having their entranceways become de facto shelters at night. And as downtown has grown, so have the expectations of life there. Those are serious points that must be considered.

Residents speak out

Commissioner Joe Carollo — who is pushing the ordinance and running for reelection — has said he is responding to resident complaints, as the Miami Herald reported. The Downtown Neighbors Alliance, a coalition of homeowners’ associations from condo buildings, is among those doing the complaining — about the tents, about crime related to the homeless population and about the negative image tent cities create. The organization’s president, James Torres, told the Editorial Board he wants the measure to go forward because at least it means the community will finally sit down to work on a problem he sees up close every day.

Arresting people isn’t any kind of real solution, though. And shelters are no panacea, either. Many homeless people say shelters can be worse than the streets. Unless there is a longer-term plan worked out, the actions allowed under this ordinance will simply perpetuate the cycle. That’s the kind of thing we hoped Miami had left behind after the Pottinger consent decree.

That was the landmark legal agreement, in place for 20 years, that prevented Miami police from arresting homeless people for loitering and other “life-sustaining” activities, including sleeping on the sidewalk and urinating in public. It was held up as a national model, the result of a 10-year-long lawsuit on behalf of 5,000 homeless people.

Other plans in the works

When U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno dissolved the agreement in 2019, he said the city had changed its attitude toward the homeless population and had a network of services for them, including Camillus House and Lotus House, medical services at the IDEA Needle Exchange and the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust. If that’s still the case, why the need for this law-enforcement effort?

We’d also like to point out that another major resource is set to come on line, perhaps as soon as spring. The 200-bed Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery will provide long- and short-term housing, primary medical care, mental-health treatment, job training — even a courtroom. It may be able to address the needs of many of the estimated 1,000 homeless people on the streets of Miami. Both the city and county have allocated money in their budgets for its operation.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez — who is running for reelection — has said he has a plan, too, using $7 million in federal American Rescue Plan money. He says he wants to bring virtually all Miami’s homeless population off the streets. (He calls that number “functional zero.”) We’ll be interested to see the details of that plan.

Both of those efforts should be given time to work. It will be more fiscally responsible. It will be more humane. But instead, Miami once again wants to treat the homeless like criminals first, and figure out how to help them later.

That leaves us with this question: What’s behind the drive to pass this ordinance? Election Day, we’re looking at you.

This story was originally published October 12, 2021 at 6:00 AM.