If you've lived in St. Pete for more than a few years, have you ever wondered where all the homeless people go at night?
If you were here a decade ago, you may remember seeing scores of people sleeping on the steps of City Hall and in numerous downtown parks at night, especially in Williams Park, which seems to be the epicenter of the city's homeless population.
Not so much these days, now that there's a law on the books that criminalizes sleeping or "reclining" in the streets, a law adopted during Mayor Bill Foster's administration. If you're busted catching a nap on a park bench (or drinking an alcohol out of an open container or an array of other petty crimes), police will offer you two choices:
Spend the night in jail, or go to Pinellas Safe Harbor, a Sheriff's Department-run complex adjacent to the jail offering beds and other services for the homeless.
This week, The Huffington Post profiled Robert Marbut, the consultant who initially pitched the Safe Harbor idea to city and county officials five years back. The in-depth, somewhat critical piece looks at the ups and downs of places like Pinellas Safe Harbor, a 470-bed complex where many of St. Petersburg's homeless go at night (and some stay during the day).
Fans of Safe Harbor say it costs a fraction of what it does to arrest someone and keep him or her in a jail cell all night. Plus, nobody walks away with any criminal charges or court fines. Proponents also dig the fact that there are services like drug and alcohol counseling on-site.
Detractors come from two vastly different camps.
Some decry the facility as a source of blight for businesses and residential areas close by; that the facility has essentially become a drunk tank by night; its residents could be dangerous to people who live or work in the area during the day. It's also a drag on nearby EMS posts, they say.
Most critics, though, say the county ought to adopt Housing First as its policy, which would be to provide homes as quickly as possible to those experiencing homelessness, and offer services as needed.
Marbut disagrees, as he recently told the Daytona Beach City Commission while he tried to convince them to build a similar facility there.
He told the commissioners that the city had been too accommodating. It should discourage “goodies” in the form of handouts from citizens and social services, he said, and it should join forces with other nearby municipalities to change their habits of “enabling” the poor.
"If you continue to do it the way you're doing it," he warned, "you will only continue to grow homelessness."
Critics, of course, view that as inhumane and inaccurate.
And while Marbut has said Pinellas Safe Harbor has reduced street homelessness by 85 to 90 percent, Huffington Post writer Arthur Delaney pointed to numbers that make Marbut's claims appear dubious:
From 2011 through 2013, nearly 80 percent of Pinellas Safe Harbor residents left within a month, and 88 percent left for unknown reasons or because they violated curfew and were kicked out, according to sheriff's department data. Just 7 percent of those leaving found permanent housing, 3 percent went to another shelter or a friend or relative, and 67 percent headed for an "unknown" destination.
The piece also highlighted new St. Pete Police Chief's approach to confronting homelessness, which, while still offering homeless people rides to Safe Harbor, also sends officers out into the streets to engage residents, homeless or not.
This article appears in Mar 5-11, 2015.