While St. Petersburg City Council members and citizens debated his future inside City Hall's plush chambers, Ray Hargis sat outside on a thin sleeping bag, listening to a radio and reading a thick mystery novel.
This little spot, between a newspaper rack and trashcan, has been Hargis' home for the last several weeks. But as close as he is to the city's main political hub, "Red" (as he is known to the other homeless) has no idea what's happening a few hundred feet away. When told about the ordinances banning sleeping in the public right-of-way, he sits straight up.
"Instead of kicking us, they should help us," he says, staring ahead. He's visibly worried. When will it be enforced? Which shelter will he be sent to? How will he get to his job?
The two men on either side of him sit up, too. "What's happening?" they ask.
Hargis, who arrived in St. Petersburg seven months ago from Virginia, refuses to go to shelters. That's why he's out here.
"I feel safer right here than in a shelter," he insists. "I feel like I'm in prison there."
He talks about getting sick for a week after staying one day at St. Vincent De Paul. He says "gangs," separated by race, run the shelters.
One of his homeless neighbors, a much younger kid, puts on his sandals to go tell other homeless what is transpiring at City Hall, hoping to organize an impromptu protest. But Hargis, tired from day labor and fitful nights of sleep, doesn't want to protest; he simply wants to be left alone.
Inside the Council chambers, 43 people come to podiums to voice opinions on people like Hargis. Some urge City Council members to approve the three ordinances banning tent cities, sleeping near residential areas and in any public right-of-way. The crowd of ordinance supporters and opponents is almost split 50/50. There's the recognizable faces from news reports and press conferences — Sarah Snyder of the Pinellas County Coalition for the Homeless, homeless advocates Bruce Wright and Eric Rubin, and the oft-quoted president of the Kenwood Neighborhood Association Jim Longstreth — but it's the impassioned pleas from less-known residents, business owners and homeless men and women that keep the Council's attention.
Downtown business owners share homeless horror stories.
"I found a pile of human waste on my entryway," says Bob Decker, a downtown businessman.
Others want permission for heavy-handed justice.
"What happens to us if we use force [to remove the homeless]?" asks a Central Avenue business owner.
And a large group of Lakewood Estates residents complains about a proposed tent city at Lakewood United Church of Christ off of 54th Avenue S., citing concerns about home values and the safety of their children.
On the other side, advocates and homeless men and women ask that street people not be vilified. Don't rush into an ordinance criminalizing the homeless, they plead.
"I'm not a criminal, I'm not a molester," says John Chapman, who is homeless. "I used to be part of the Chamber of Commerce. I'm no different from you guys."
In the end, the City Council unanimously passes all three ordinances. Before casting their votes, the City Council members and the mayor agree it's the first step to combating the homeless crisis. When Councilman Bill Foster makes his statement, he says the ordinances send a clear message: "We will not be the city of Woodstock wannabes."
The council chambers empty and people flood out of City Hall into a pounding rainstorm. Hargis, the homeless man, is under an awning. He remains silent, clutching his drenched sleeping bag, as people hurriedly walk past.
But for all the praise the City Council received from residents for passing the anti-sleeping ordinances, the immediate effect on the city's swelled homeless population will be negligible.
The tent cities on 15th and 18th streets are already gone; organizers began dismantling the sites days before the vote. The ordinance still leaves room for the city to approve permits for other tent cities, like the one adjacent to St. Vincent DePaul. The most sweeping ordinance is also the one lacking the most teeth: Police can only enforce the ordinance if there is shelter space available within three miles.
In cases from Portland, Ore., to Los Angeles, courts have ruled that ordinances banning sleeping on public sidewalks violate the prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. If there is no available shelter space, courts ruled, cities cannot criminalize the unavoidable act of sleeping in public.
In St. Petersburg, on any given night, the majority of the city's homeless population cannot be moved into a shelter because there is not enough shelter space. And there's about to be even less. On March 31, the Northwest Presbyterian Church on the city's north side will close, putting 76 more homeless people back on the street. As the weather warms up, the temporary cold shelters will stop taking in people. The only new shelter space proposed is the former PSTA building in Largo, which will hold 150 beds, but even that plan is not finalized. Funding to run the facility has yet to be approved. Those working on the project say it should be ready in 90 days, the same statement they made last month.
But even if there is a bed available, there's another step. The shelter must agree to accept the homeless person, and many shelters in Pinellas County have intake policies that restrict certain groups from entering: inebriated individuals, unmarried couples and/or those who refuse to take part in religious functions. If a police officer approaches a drunken man sleeping on the sidewalk, and the only shelters with open beds are those that refuse drunken individuals, under the ordinance the officer would not be able to arrest the man for sleeping outside. (A public inebriation charge would be another option, but that would hardly solve the problem of where this homeless man will sleep once he's released from jail.)
There are also questions on whether homeless people will agree to go to a shelter up to three miles away, one of the provisions of the ordinance.
"It is going to cause friction," predicts Snyder of PCCH. "The homeless folks are like everybody else — they get used to their neighborhoods."
Disputing the ordinances' constitutionality, the Pinellas public defender's office and the Pinellas County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union have already come out against the ordinance.
Local attorney Mark Kamleiter says the City Council is setting itself up for a lawsuit.
"You are talking about passing ordinances that are going to criminalize the homeless, and you don't have the beds for them," he told the City Council after presenting a letter condemning the ordinances signed by the Southern Legal Conference, National Law Center on Homeless and Poverty and the national ACLU. "So you are asking us to suppose the future when you may have the beds. … I got a suggestion that makes a lot more common sense — get the beds and come back to us and talk about it."
This article appears in Mar 21-27, 2007.