On a recent muggy spring night in the Palmetto Beach section of Tampa, Bill Williams is showing me where he sleeps. We head into the woods, up a slight hill and past CSX train tracks, not far from the homes in this quiet community south of Adamo Drive and east of the Port of Tampa. After a short walk, during which he holds back the tree branches so they don't slam into my face, we're in his "home": a collection of tents and chairs, mostly.
It's one of many such encampments in the area, hidden enclaves where some of the over 9,500 homeless people in the county spend their nights. Resources exist to provide food and transportation for the homeless, but shelter remains elusive. And with the hot summer coming on, that becomes a bigger problem than ever.
Last October, Catholic Charities proposed to set up a "tent city" (similar to the one they'd established in Pinellas in 2007) that would provide temporary housing for up to 250 people on a plot of land off eastern Hillsborough Avenue. But the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) rejected the plan by a vote of 4-3.
A week later, after being ripped by local editorial boards (and the New York Times), two of the commissioners who voted no — Kevin White and Al Higginbotham — proposed to house the homelesss in vacant office space at the abandoned Floriland Mall. But the owners said no.
There were rumors that Catholic Charities would come back with a different proposal, but the Charities' president, Frank Murphy, told CL in May, "We don't have published plans at this time." And if such a project were to surface, neighborhood activists who opposed the tent city in October are prepared to do battle again, according to their website, StopTentCity.com.
At the time the Floriland option was being discussed, Commissioner White said, "I think it's imperative that we come together and find some kind of solution."
But since the tent-city debates subsided, the Commission's silence on the subject of homelessness has been deafening.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, Bill Williams, 58, was at the southeast corner of Adamo and 22nd Avenue, holding a sign asking for help. IKEA shoppers coming from the South Bay passed him without stopping on their way into the Swedish department store's massive parking lot.
Williams's sign says "Need work." He says he was a bricklayer, and can work with tile, stone and carpentry, "anything to build a house with."
He ended up homeless after going to prison for a DUI in 2006 (he was also in possession of drugs). He says once he got out of prison, he purchased a plane ticket to vacation in Costa Rica for 10 days, but his stay ended up lasting 10 months, during which he got heavily into cocaine ("A beer costs $1.25 there, a hit of coke $1," he explains). But he's been clean and sober since returning from that vacation.
He doesn't have very warm words for Mayor Iorio. "She wants the police to hassle us, to move out of Tampa," and he knows it's not good for Ybor City's image to see people like him soliciting, because "tourists see that Tampa isn't taking care of its own."
But Williams has a remarkably positive attitude. He attributes that to getting religion, which he says gives him a sense of security in terrain that sometimes doesn't provide much. He gets $200 worth of food stamps a month, which broken down equals less than $7 a day. But that money can't be used for any restaurants, including McDonald's, which means lots of cold Cuban sandwiches, as well as Vienna sausages and tuna fish.
He mentions a friend who was beaten up by a fellow homeless person. Such reports are familiar to law enforcement officials in Florida, as the state reports the hightest rate in the U.S. of violence against the homeless — one reason why Governor Charlie Crist last month signed a bill making it a hate crime to attack a homeless person.
A block away from Williams on Adamo, 48-year-old Kenneth was also hoping for handouts (he did not want us to publish his full name).
Kenneth is understandably gun-shy around a reporter. A review of his prison record reveals he's been incarcerated on and off since 1998, but has been a free man since early 2008.
He says he's been back in Tampa for the past three months, and does have a cousin he speaks with. He says he could move in with her, but she has kids, a boyfriend that Kenneth isn't sure about, and she drinks, which he says wouldn't be a good influence as he tries to get his life together.
Eating a hamburger on a Monday afternoon in Ybor City, he says, "I never saw myself living on the streets, man. When I had a job at Tampa General Hospital, I was so happy and things were going so good ... I never saw myself living on the streets, scared to sleep, walking the streets all night long, worrying about somebody doing something to me. I never saw that happening."
Numerous churches, private citizens and social service organizations feed the homeless, 33 of them in partnership with Metropolitan Ministries. And the Hillsborough Homeless Recovery Program provides bus passes and bag drop-offs and even helps pay for a night's stay at the Salvation Army.
The one universal need is for shelter with stability, a base where the homeless can make a new start.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, chronic homelessness dropped nationally by 28 percent between 2005 to 2008, with some communities seeing even steeper declines. Rayme Knuckles of the Homeless Coalition of Hillsborough County says that much of that reduction is attributable to a "housing first" model that moves people off the streets and into permanent housing with "wraparound" services to encourage self-sufficiency, which he calls a "mind shift" in the field.
The tent city model proposed last fall would have operated according to this model. Meanwhile, in contrast to the decline in homeless numbers in other parts of the country, the numbers in Hillsborough have remained relatively constant, says Knuckles (the last official count from 2009 was 9,556).
Other homeless advocates in the county have tried to address the housing problem. Lela Lilyquist is the director of Portamento Hope in Brandon, where she's been feeding the homeless for nearly two years. At the time the BOCC was discussing the tent city, she was trying to open discussion on an alternative to tents — using out-of-use FEMA trailers and cottages instead.
But Lilyquist hasn't gotten much further with the Commission than Catholic Charities has.
A 2009 survey by the Homeless Coalition of Hillsborough County reported that 41 percent of the county's homeless population is experiencing homelessness for the first time. Terry Bowzer and Tina Tuck fall into that category.
Two days after we met Bill Williams, we tried to catch up with him across from a Citgo gas station near IKEA, at a public feeding. There we saw him sitting on the ground with Bowzer and Tuck, a couple who have been together for 11 years but became homeless in the last year.
The couple moved to Florida three years ago from Jackson, Michigan, one of the regions most affected by the recession. Bowzer got work at a construction company and stayed employed for nearly two years, but in 2009 "the bottom fell out" for them, and he was collecting unemployment until three months ago.
Tuck had been working at the Tampa Convention center doing housekeeping jobs. But she says, "It's really down right now, with the economy and stuff. There are not many shows, a lot of them have been canceled." The days she was called into work began dwindling from five a week to one or two, and lately, nothing.
With Tuck's modest income and Bowzer's unemployment checks, they were able to afford $125 a week for a room, but with their income drying up, so did any chance of housing.
The Salvation Army provides free housing for a week and $10 a night after that, but the couple doesn't want to split up, as per Salvation Army Rules.
So until then, they'll go where they can to find a safe place to sleep together.
Commissioner Rose Ferlita, who voted in favor of the tent city last fall, says she'd be glad to see another housing proposal from Catholic Charities. "We don't need to clean up the city to get [the homeless] out of town for the GOP convention or the Super Bowl," she says. "We need to get something done for them that helps them." She says that public attention to the homeless in Tampa/Hillsborough seems to cycle in and out, but the problem never goes away; it's an issue that always needs to be addressed.
Another commissioner who supported the tent city proposal, Kevin Beckner, said he was disappointed that the original Catholic Charities plan didn't happen, because he considered it a well-thought-out project. "I don't think you'll find some perfect location, because there'll always be some opposition."
CL contacted Commissioners White and Higginbotham for their views, but they did not return our calls for comment.
Meanwhile, the beat goes on for those in Tampa and Hillsborough County who have found themselves, for whatever reasons, on the streets.
