by Sarah Gerard
“It’s obvious to anyone paying even a little attention that Williams Park has gotten significantly worse,” council member Karl Nurse told the Tampa Bay Times. “We’ve got to step it up.”57
Marbut made nine visits to St. Petersburg and delivered his findings to new mayor Rick Kriseman and the city council on June 5.58 “This is kind of a good news/bad news/good news situation,” he began. New daytime “hot spots” were popping up around the city, and about forty-five to sixty-five people were floating between them, mostly between the hours of six and eleven in the morning—that’s after shelters kicked them out, and before the new day program at St. Vincent de Paul, the city’s largest homeless shelter, let them in. Marbut noted that St. Petersburg police didn’t seem to be engaging much with homeless people anymore. “That’s a real concern,” he said.
He made six recommendations, the first of which was recommitting the police department. The others included deciding whether street outreach teams should focus on individuals or families, because they weren’t doing a good job splitting their efforts between the two; starting a whole new program to service homeless families alone; putting more money into St. Vincent’s day program, to open it earlier; putting more money into Safe Harbor; and reinstating the sheriff’s Chronically Homeless Jail Diversion and Intervention program.
“Does Robert Marbut have any money in his pocket?” Sheriff Bob Gualtieri asked the Tampa Bay Times, noting that the Chronically Homeless Jail Diversion and Intervention program was very expensive. “He breezes in and out of here and calls for things, but who is going to follow through?”
The ninety-day Chronically Homeless Jail Diversion and Intervention pilot program had come to an end the previous October.59 Through the program, 155 of the county’s chronically homeless individuals, including its twenty-two “most recalcitrant,” were diverted to an effort intended to steer them into addiction-recovery programs or into transitional housing if they were already sober. Under the Chronically Homeless Jail Diversion and Intervention program, individuals arrested for minor infractions, such as an open-container charge, were held in solitary confinement60 for an indefinite period of time instead of being released within the usual twenty-four hours. During this time they met daily with Safe Harbor and Pinellas County public defender personnel, who encouraged them to transfer out of the jail and into Safe Harbor. At Safe Harbor, the sheriff said, people struggling with addiction could be assigned a bed at a treatment facility—which would help them get clean, though not help them find housing. When asked by the St. Petersburg Tribune how long he was legally allowed to hold these individuals, Gualtieri responded, “We’ll have to deal with it as we go. You are asking for an answer to an unanswerable question.”61
Only not everyone wanted to go to Safe Harbor, even when faced with the threat of more jail time. Out of 155 program “participants,” only 93 individuals opted to go to Safe Harbor.62 Safe Harbor isn’t that different from jail—and at least the jail is air-conditioned. It’s hot in the outdoor pod, and it rains. In jail, they still get three meals a day and a plastic mat, and nobody tries to force them into treatment. So why bother with the shelter?
And because Safe Harbor doesn’t do follow-up casework, there was no way to know whether or not the Chronically Homeless Jail Diversion and Intervention program actually helped get people off the streets for good. Everyone seemed to agree it did, but the best analyses were anecdotal: “We are not seeing them as much as before,” Major Dede Carron, who ran the homeless outreach program for the St. Petersburg Police Department, told the Tribune. “They are staying in jail longer and they seem to disappear after, so we are presuming they are going into treatment.”
The choice of being taken to Safe Harbor instead of the jail was already available to homeless people arrested on petty ordinances before the Chronically Homeless Jail Diversion and Intervention program had been instated. And increasing numbers of homeless people familiar with the system, even those who weren’t part of the Chronically Homeless Jail Diversion and Intervention program, were opting to go to jail instead of going to the shelter. Consequently, the number of people identified as homeless when booked into jail had gone up since just a year after Safe Harbor opened, from 17.6 percent in 2012 to 23.5 percent in 2013. But closing it wasn’t an option, said the sheriff. Enough people still opted to go there over jail—and jail costs the sheriff’s department ten times more.63
The sheriff’s department shoulders half the expense for Safe Harbor. Of the shelter’s $2.2 million annual cost, $1.6 million comes out of the sheriff’s budget.64 The rest comes out of the county, and those costs are offset by donations from various cities.65 Clearwater chips in $100,000, as it sends the second-highest number of homeless citizens to the shelter. Largo has never contributed, citing increased stress on its emergency services, since the area around Safe Harbor falls within its jurisdiction. Pinellas Park, Dunedin, and the beach communities pitch in what they can. St. Petersburg’s share is the largest: upon Marbut’s most recent suggestion, it tacked another $50,000 onto its standing $100,000 contribution. It also increased its police presence downtown: officers began paying special attention to Williams Park and other Marbut-identified “hot spots” and stepping up their arrests for petty ordinances.
All seemed quiet for the next year or so. Then, in the summer of 2015, the Tampa Bay Times reported that in the last two years a program run by the City of St. Petersburg had bused close to a thousand homeless people, some of them addicted to drugs or mentally ill, across the country.66 But after busing these people to who knows where, the city didn’t make any follow-up phone calls—there was no way to know for sure where they ended up. A street outreach officer told the Times, “I’m not a caseworker,” and other officials voiced similar opinions. The Times reproached the city for its lack of accountability and “not in my backyard” attitude—but admitted the program was very popular among those being bused. According to the article at least one rider confessed that getting his ticket out of town was no less than a matter of life and death.
The day before Marbut’s meeting with the city council, Michelle Obama launched the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness, an initiative that enlisted mayors, governors, and county and community leaders nationwide in the effort to house every homeless veteran by the end of 2015.67 The US Department of Veterans Affairs had first announced the mission to end veteran homelessness in 2009—now the White House was calling on localities to get serious. The First Lady told the US Conference of Mayors, in Washington, DC, that roughly 58,000 veterans were experiencing homelessness in America at the time.68 Veteran homelessness had dropped by 24 percent in the last three years with the institution of Supportive Services for Veteran Families, a program keeping low-income veteran families from falling into homelessness, and the strengthening of HUD-VASH, which gives housing vouchers to homeless veterans. But federal programs could only do so much, Obama said. In some of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, there may be as few as a few hundred homeless veterans. Communities know where to find those veterans, and know their needs, so should know how to house them.
In January 2015, Mayor Kriseman of St. Petersburg took up the First Lady’s challenge.69 The point-in-time count that month had revealed an increase in the overall number of homeless people in Pinellas County—up from 5,887 the previous year to 6,853,70 including 621 veterans in Pinellas County alone, of the almost 3,000 total homeless veterans in the tri-county area.71 Kriseman initiated the Pinellas County Task Force to End Veteran Homelessness, a countywide effort among cities and service-providing agencies headed by St. Vincent de Paul, St. Petersburg’s largest homeless shelter, to identify, find, and house every veteran.
When I talk with St. Vincent de Paul’s executive director, Michael Raposa, about the project in January 2016, he tells me the tri-county area is now home to less than two hundred homeless veterans.72 “To say that the housing doesn’t exist is an excuse,” he says. We sit alone at a boardroom table in his office, overl
ooking a roomful of caseworkers chattering on their phones. “We’ve got a database of four hundred fifty-four, last year, landlords that we used. It’s all private stock. Sometimes clients have a VASH voucher, or a Section 8 voucher, but most of the time they don’t. It’s only for about twenty-five percent that we’re using subsidized housing. Most of the time, they can do it on their own.”
St. Vincent de Paul works with clients to find suitable locations and housing within their financial means. Most of the units are in smaller complexes of eight or less, as it’s easier to form relationships with those landlords. Landlords in smaller complexes tend to have more freedom in deciding whether to overlook a criminal record, for instance. The goal for housing clients is thirty days after first contact. Once they’re housed, their caseworkers connect them with services and disability insurance, if they need it. They help them with budgeting. They even help them budget for illegal drugs.
“We help them see, ‘You have a thousand dollars coming in. First thing that has to go out is your rent and utilities. You’ve got four hundred dollars to play with a month, so one hundred a week for four weeks of discretionary income. You’re going to have to eat off that unless you go to the soup kitchen. What’s your drug habit?’”
This seems very forward-thinking. But, I ask, doesn’t addiction tend to get more expensive over time?
“There’s a difference between drug use and drug abuse,” Raposa says. For those using it to treat mental illness, they work with them. Adherence to their prescribed medications is critical. “But we tell them, point-blank, ‘We don’t care what you do. We just can’t have this housing fail.’”
I ask him what the biggest challenge facing formerly homeless people is once they get inside.
“Loneliness,” he says. “All the social workers are surprised by this. I’m not.” People in poverty are motivated by relations, he explains. People in the middle class are motivated by achievement. “You’ve probably got a college degree.”
I say that I do.
“The vast majority of homeless people are generational, meaning that their parents had tenuous housing, and their grandparents had tenuous housing,” he says. “And we’re also seeing that the age difference, in some situations, between those generations, is only twenty years. We’ve got grandparents at thirty-two, because they had a kid when they were sixteen, and their kid had a kid when they were sixteen. Now they’re a grandmother, and taking care of a grandchild.”
Earlier, in the waiting room, I’d sat next to a young mother with her child on her lap. She was tattooed and pierced, with ripped jeans and ironic socks, reminiscent of the way I dressed in high school. She couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty. Her son played quietly on her phone. She kissed him on the back of his head and the tips of his ears. She held his hand when a woman called them up.
Raposa says, “We’re trying to tweak a system that actually has a deeper understanding of poverty, and can work within the framework of those issues in a nonjudgmental way, and actually lift people up as opposed to standing on our mighty, middle-class high horse, thinking, ‘You should want this horse because I have one.’ Truly, that just doesn’t work.
“Military recruiters target low-income populations. It’s not that much of a stretch to realize that these guys didn’t have a lot of ace skills going in, they went in and served, they were released in an economic environment where college graduates are having a hard time finding a job. It’s low-level jobs, and you’re living in a community where you need to be making $14.50 an hour just to survive. The jobs that they’re getting are minimum-wage—$8.05 an hour in Florida. They deserve more. On top of the psychological stuff they’re dealing with.”
St. Vincent de Paul serves the entire homeless population, not just veterans. On the way in, I had passed several blocks of people sitting on the sidewalk or lying on the grass, or resting inside St. Vincent’s caged-in courtyard beneath the freeway overpass. I ask Raposa what needs to happen in order for the organization to bring the housing-first services they’re bringing to veterans to the nonveteran population as well. There is almost no rapid-rehousing money for nonveterans in Pinellas, he says, but they’re working to fix that. The Homeless Leadership Board has just submitted an application to HUD for a half-million dollars, though that won’t even scratch the surface.
“Those numbers are off the charts,” he says. “Pinellas is about six years or seven years behind where we are with veterans. It’s going to take a huge investment to catch it up.” But what they’re doing for veterans now is clearing the path. They’re demonstrating performance, which makes it easier for less progressive city and county officials to see the efficacy of the housing-first philosophy. In fact, St. Vincent’s has already been talking with the City of St. Petersburg about funding a three-year $2.25 million initiative to house every person sleeping in the area around St. Vincent de Paul, he says. It’s a lot of money, but the city is considering it.
The consensus at the next July breakfast is that the powdered eggs look like dog diarrhea. No one had read the can closely: they’re filler eggs for baking, not eggs for eating alone. We stand around the island counter looking at the pan. Fresh from the oven, the top layer has congealed into a matte brown mass. Rita, a volunteer, pushes it aside with a spoon. “Father Lord Jesus in heaven, we ask you to beautify these eggs so they can work in your service for people,” she says.
Something is wrong with the fan in the kitchen. Steam rises up off the grill and from the dishes in the sink, sticking to the sides of our faces and saturating all of the towels. G.W. steps out to catch his breath in the fellowship hall. I follow him to a far back table near the stage and ask him what’s bothering him aside from the eggs.
“I’ve made mistakes this week,”73 he says. “The eggs, and the expenses . . .”
I wait for him to finish.
“I wasted some of the money,” he finally admits. “I ain’t gonna tell them that. And in my personal life . . . I relapsed.”
G.W. has never been clean in the twelve-step sense. He loves alcohol. He takes pain pills. But he’s made a new friend who smokes crack. They like each other, but they can’t last this way. They’ve been smoking together for a few weeks. He has to stop.
“God is telling me I’m already free,” he says. “These are the times when God is most evident. You ask God to walk you through crossroads.”
He takes my hand.
In 2009, shortly after I met him, G.W. was hospitalized with liver cancer. We didn’t know each other well, but something sent me to the hospital with a bag full of magazines to visit him. When I entered the room I was surprised to see him in a gown, this man I usually saw in a button-down shirt. Something about the way he’s holding himself reminds me of this now.
At sixty, G.W. isn’t a healthy man. His walk is more of a shuffle, and he often struggles to breathe. He leans against whatever is nearest him when he stands. When he climbs in and out of my car, I frequently ask him if he’s okay. I ask him now if he’s going to seek treatment.
“My needs lay where I am,” he says. “I will find a way to stop. You know why? Because I told you about it.”
He’ll move out of his apartment, he says, away from his friends who are using. He’ll get his head straight, get back on track with the things he’s doing, start reading again, start thinking the way he needs to be thinking.
“I’m of the opinion that God doesn’t give a damn what you do,” he says. “Jesus said it’s not what goes into man that defines him, it’s what comes out.”
I ask him if the person he’s smoking crack with goes to church.
“No.” He laughs. “She’s astounded I’m a minister.”
He was up late last night and is very tired. He makes it through breakfast and gets into my car afterward. I drop him off at his house and he struggles up the walkway, breathing heavily. I say a prayer as I pull away, watching him in my rearview mirror.
By the end of Easy Street, G.W. finds a way inside.74 He’
s gotten a job and is making money. For the first few weeks, he still sleeps in the park, washing up in the public restrooms in the morning and stashing his bags at someone’s house during the day. He takes the bus an hour and a half to work at a travel agency selling vacations over the phone. He makes commission. None of his colleagues know he’s homeless. He lives in fear of someone finding out, and in fear of someone stealing his money while he sleeps. Weeks into the gig, he’s able to rent a room at the Kelly Hotel.
“I didn’t really want to get into a hotel room,” he says as he walks across the stark lobby, reading a newspaper. “I really tried hard to find an apartment, but I couldn’t. I looked everywhere.”
We cut to him sitting at a small wooden table next to a refrigerator. There’s a newspaper, a pack of Seneca cigarettes, a lighter, an ashtray, and a pair of sunglasses within reach. He sips a forty-ounce bottle of Natural Ice.
“I pay one hundred seventy-five dollars a week for this room, which is probably a little steep,” he says. “There’s no cushion in a hotel room, you know, with this job, and with a hotel room and having to pay week by week, anything could happen. I could get fired. I could get sick. I could lose my voice and not be able to talk on the phone. Anything could happen. The first step was getting a job, and I got that, and I’m pleased with that. The next step is getting an apartment and getting a place of my own.”
He microwaves a prewrapped sandwich he bought at the convenience store around the corner. He sits on the bed in his socks, eating his sandwich, with the newspaper spread next to him. The comforter is a loud floral pattern, in jarring contrast to the room’s ascetic interior.
