Jon DeCarmine: Homeless facts
If we want to get homeless people off of the street, we have to be willing to provide a place where they can go. GRACE Marketplace stands as the centerpiece of the local 10-year plan to end homelessness. The project aims to create a One-Stop Homeless Assistance Center by bringing together nearly a dozen service providers working together to provide the services people need to get off the streets, all in one location.
Tonight's Gainesville City Commission meeting is the culmination of three years of effort by city and county staff, service providers and homeless advocates intent on creating a comprehensive facility where homeless people eat, sleep, take showers, do laundry and receive education and job training, case management and mental health and substance abuse treatment.
The city plan board last month recommended to the commission that the facility be able to include shelter and transitional housing, echoing the position advocates have taken from the very beginning. The effectiveness of all other services hinges on access to some form of housing, and despite the best case management in the world, if someone doesn't have a place to stay at the end of the night, they're still homeless. In order to have a true impact on homelessness, and its downtown visibility, people must have a place to go.
Mark Hurm's Speaking Out piece (April 2) misstates a number of facts:
The budget estimate for renovations that was prepared by the city has been checked and rechecked. It totals $238,567, plus a 5 percent contingency, all of which is covered in the budget approved by the City Commission. This is not, nor has it ever been, a multi-million dollar project. Instead, it leverages hundreds of thousands of dollars in in-kind commitments from Alachua County's finest social service agencies. If required, the city manager has committed to covering the cost of a sidewalk from the one-stop center to the bus stop on 39th Ave., at an estimated cost of $50,000.
Further, Hurm repeatedly refers to recently released documents that have been used in misguided efforts to present homelessness as a criminal issue, rather than an economic and social issue. These documents have been presented to the public as a five-inch thick stack purportedly containing the criminal records of 1,226 homeless felons, and have been held up as supposed damning evidence of the dangers poor people pose to the general public. But apart from one report identifying 27 persons with lengthy criminal histories, the vast bulk of these records consist of meeting agendas and minutes, internal e-mail records, operational policies and procedures, and the like.
In fact, Gainesville Police Department records show 14,951 separate people were arrested on felony charges from 2004 to present. Of those, only 431 were homeless. When misdemeanors are counted as well, only 510 of the 22,259 people arrested were homeless. The most common incident involving homeless persons over the past four years was simple trespass or trespass warning.
After tonight's meeting, advocates, neighborhood activists and commissioners will have had their say and then retire to their comfortable homes. In the meantime, we still have more than 1,300 men, women and children who will fall asleep without a place of their own to call home. These people who cannot wait for another committee meeting, another task force, or another study to decide whether they need a place to go.
People have a right to exist, and to have the basic human rights of food and shelter afforded to them. Times are tougher and tougher for more and more people, and our community is in crisis. With a recession looming, evictions and foreclosures skyrocketing, and plummeting government support for social services, we cannot afford to stall or altogether undo efforts to help people in need.
We need more housing for homeless people, and we need it now.
Jon DeCarmine is Executive Director of the Gainesville/Ala
