Ron Book claims there are only 555 "unsheltered" homeless in Miami-Dade, according to the Miami Times article dated April 13th.
This morning, I made a count of the homeless Registered Citizen population of Miami-Dade county (i.e., persons listed on the state "sex offense registry"). Of the 1300 Registered Persons listed as living in Miami-Dade County (not counting dead, deported, incarcerated, or absconded Registrants), 432 are listed as "transient." That means 33.2% (roughly a third) of Miami-Dade's registrant population are homeless. Even this number is a misnomer, as 107 Registrants are listed at 18201 SW 12th St., Miami, FL 33194-2700, i.e., the Krome Detention Center. (Despite adjusting the search to exclude incarcerated persons, some were still listed during the search. If adjusted to remove those at Krome, the homeless registrant population is 36.2%.
If Ron Book's claim of 555 unsheltered homeless number is to be believed, then Ron Book is directly responsible for 77.8% of the unsheltered homeless issue in Miami.
No one else wants to call him out. I have no problems doing it, of course. Yet,Ron Book still keeps this Homeless Trust gig, desite having lived in Broward County for over half a decade. He has no business running the Homeless Trust.
City of Miami doubles down on homeless sweeps
Lack of affordable housing blamed by some for ongoing problem
Erik Bojnansky Miami Times Senior Writer Apr 13, 2021 Updated Apr 14, 2021
The City of Miami will ramp up its campaign to dismantle homeless encampments, in spite of concerns that such actions might violate the civil rights of the people living there.
On April 8, the Miami City Commission unanimously authorized the city to ramp up “homeless cleanup response” sweeps to twice a week.
William Porro, assistant director of the city’s human services department, said the cleanup frequencies need to be increased and improved in order to reduce Miami’s homeless population in an effective, yet humane way. As of January 2020, the latest demographic survey by the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, nearly 57% of Miami-Dade County’s homeless population was Black.
“We truly do want to give individuals dignified, humane assistance in referring them to the established continuum of care, [and] this includes housing,” Porro told commissioners at last Thursday’s meeting.
Since Feb. 10, the City of Miami has conducted 23 “major cleanups” utilizing personnel from 10 city departments including police, sanitation and human services’ “green shirts” – a team of formerly homeless individuals. During those cleanups, Porro claimed that more than 20 tons of garbage were carted away. The sweeps were launched four months after an appellate court scrapped a 1998 legal settlement known as the Pottinger Agreement that governed how the city could treat people living on the streets. It also accompanied legislation banning the feeding of the homeless outside of designated areas, or giving them tents.
Benjamin Waxman, president of the Greater Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization has no problem with the city cleaning up the sidewalks near the makeshift encampments, or offering shelter beds. What the ACLU does object to is city employees harassing the homeless or throwing away their property.
“The city is supposed to be committed to assisting homeless people, not making their lives more miserable,” Waxman said.
The ACLU denounced the first set of sweeps in a Feb. 23 letter to City of Miami.
“City workers seized and destroyed people’s belongings, including their tents. One person reported sustaining injuries while being dragged in the street inside his own tent as it was being taken to be placed in the garbage. … While at least some (homeless) were offered hotel rooms, they were not given any information about how long they could stay or what would happen after their stay at the hotel room ended,” the ACLU letter stated.
Porro admitted he’s in the process of adjusting how the sweeps are conducted.
“I have … asked for a legal review just to clarify … the things we can and cannot do in terms of the tents and a lot of the nuances that entails,” Porro said during the April 8 city commission meeting.
David Peery, a formerly homeless individual-turned-homeless advocate, said those adjustments were apparent during an April 7 city sweep of encampments in Overtown at NW 10th and 11th Streets between NW 3rd and 5th Avenues. While a few disheveled tents were dismantled and thrown away, city workers did not touch tents that were on the sidewalks. Instead, municipal employees used pressure cleaners to clean around the tents. Peery opined that the city’s actions that day mainly had to do with the fact that several homeless advocates were present to watch the city employees.
“We had a large contingent of people show up. They were looking at us looking at them. It was kind of weird,” Peery said.
Waxman said the respectful attitude city employees displayed at the April 7 sweep was very different than what he witnessed a week earlier in downtown Miami at NW 1st Court and 1st Place.
“That cleanup effort was, in my estimation, very chaotic. It was not respectful of the people’s rights, and was much more aggressive,” the ACLU attorney told The Miami Times.
During his testimony to city commissioners, Porro said his teams are still up against “well-meaning individuals” who still insist on giving tents and food to the homeless. Porro also acknowledged that homeless encampments continue to pop up at certain “hot spots” after sweeps.
“We’ve got to tweak the whole continuum of care and outreach,” Porro said. “They’re doing an amazing job getting people referred to shelters. But shelter-resistant individuals, for a variety of reasons, are put back on the street after two weeks. Seriously, it is really a difficult situation.”
Commissioner Joe Carollo said the city has done a much better job dismantling homeless encampments in Little Havana. However, Carollo added, “tent cities” are still very visible in downtown Miami.
“I have to say that downtown is beginning to look like a war zone,” Carollo told Porro.
Porro replied that 54% of Miami’s unsheltered homeless, 355 individuals, congregate in that area. In comparison, Overtown, a neighborhood with the second-largest concentration of homeless, has 89 unsheltered individuals, or 13% of Miami’s homeless population.
Commissioner Jeffrey Watson, whose district includes Overtown, asked Porro if additional funding was needed.
“Are there any financial commitments not fulfilled?” Watson asked.
“We are all looking at that very carefully with a sharp pencil, because we don’t want to increase costs, obviously,” Porro replied, adding, “There are some positions in our outreach team that we need to fill.”
Homeless advocates insist there aren’t enough shelter beds to accommodate the county’s entire unsheltered population, which is why some people donate tents to the homeless. However, Ron Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, insisted that the city’s estimated unsheltered population of 555 is the lowest since August 2014. At the same time, Book said he’s been able to leverage COVID-19 federal funding to obtain additional beds in local hotels.
“During the course of the pandemic, we have seen the greatest allocation in U.S. history of new federal money for housing and homelessness, and we are scaling up. We have more than 1,000 households referred to housing right now and that number grows daily,” Book wrote in an email to The Miami Times. “We want to engage people effectively and get them in the pipeline to benefit from these tremendous new resources.”
On Friday, April 9, in a press conference at Camillus House’s main shelter at 1603 NW 7th Ave., Mayor Francis Suarez announced the donation of 150 new, adjustable mechanical beds from Reach Out America, a Texas-based nonprofit that provides disaster relief supplies. Hilda Fernandez, CEO of Camillus House, said the 150 beds would be deployed within the organization’s 11 facilities throughout Miami-Dade County, which already encompasses around 1,800 beds.
Suarez said the bed donations will help Miami combat homelessness, adding that his city was even now developing plans to reduce the unsheltered population to “functional zero.”
“We want to get to the point where they are all able to reintegrate into society … in a humane fashion,” Suarez said.
The best way to do that, Waxman countered, is to build more housing that’s actually affordable for low-income individuals and families.
“That is why they keep coming back [to the street]. The alternatives are simply not there,” Waxman said.
