It’s starting to look like St. Petersburg might succeed in sweeping the homeless out of downtown.

At tomorrow’s St. Pete City Council meeting, councilmembers are expected to pass two more ordinances targeting the city’s homeless that would ban all storage of property in the right-of-way, and prohibit sleeping or “reclining” in the downtown area during daylight hours.

A St. Pete Times article today says a compromise might be a storage area at St. Vincent de Pauls on Fifth Avenue North and the Salvation Army on Fourth Street South, however a city official mentioned funding a guard for the storage sites, which might not go over well with taxpayers.

This follows an expanded anti-panhandling ordinance passed earlier this month and a series of rules passed last year aimed at tent cities, camping in city limits and sleeping on sidewalks.

In fact, more ordinances governing homelessness have been passed in the last year than any other year in recent memory. By next week, those unfortunate individuals who have found themselves living on the street will no longer be able to sleep (day and possibly night), ask for money or store their belongings. Many of the ordinances have targeted the downtown region, which in all likelihood will push these individuals into surrounding neighborhoods or municipalities.

All issues have multiple sides, but most of the attention has gone to the opinions of city officials and business owners. Below are two letters CL has received in recent weeks regarding the situation in St. Pete.

The first is from G.W. Rolle, a formerly homeless man who spent four years on St. Pete’s streets. Last year, he was featured in the widely viewed Easy Street documentary chronicling the homeless situation here.

The second letter is from Richard Shireman, one-half of the city’s Homeless Outreach Team and a longtime staffer of Operation Par Inc., which serves the needs of people suffering from mental illness.

Follow the jump for both letters (mostly unedited, though I’ve added Web site links for context):

This article appears in Jan 23-29, 2008.