Homelessness is rampant across the state and nation. Service providers say they’re seeing greater numbers of those in need. Florida, with its warm weather, has the third-highest number of unhoused people in the U.S. And some are wondering if there are other reasons why people are coming here.
On a single night in January 2023, there were nearly 31,000 homeless people in Florida, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
And across the state, communities are preparing for a new Florida law that takes effect on October 1st. It prevents cities and counties from allowing people to sleep on public property. In Tallahassee, social service organizations like the Kearney Center shelter are already seeing an influx of new clients, and facing the stark reality that more will be coming.
“We won’t have the capacity to take care of our own."
Sonya Wilson is the center’s executive director. The center has seen an influx of people coming from out-of-state, and it’s started charging them 10 dollars per night to stay. Wilson is worried about the impact on the center’s ability to care for people in its service area.
"So this isn’t to penalize or be ugly," Wilson said. "This is all in an effort to use the facility what it’s meant for, and that is our community. Putting our community first. And I make no apologies about that.”
She says she’s not talking about people from nearby Georgia.
“I’m talking about people from New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Pittsburgh, Illinois…individuals that are literally coming here with the clothes on their back, a bus ticket here, a Greyhound, and then they are given directions to come directly here to the Kearney Center,” said Wilson.
Those are all blue states. Rick Kearney, the founder of the center and its board president, told the Tallahassee Democrat he suspects political motivations may be at play because Republican Governor Ron DeSantis lives in the capital city. But it’s just a hunch, he said.
“Even though their bus ticket might have originated in a blue state, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re from a blue state," said Kearney. "They may just have been passing through a blue state. It’s really way too early to tell, unless we were to do some deeper data analysis.”
He says the reasons more people are coming vary and that some might be immigrants.
“I think there’s some of that, but I think this is population overflow -- especially among homeless individuals, where the cities from which they are coming are at their capacity, and they’ve found it more economical to put them on a bus than to sustain them," he said. "I don’t know that there’s a motive other than to save money.”
It's not unusual for local municipalities and shelters to send unhoused people away. The Kearney Center and other local agencies do the same: offering bus tickets to people to communities where they have relatives or the hope of a job. The Kearney Center recently sent a family of 9 to South Florida -- in part because the center doesn’t accept children.
Karen Woodall runs the Florida People’s Advocacy Center in Tallahassee. She acknowledges that another state could have sent people here because DeSantis sent a planeload of undocumented immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard.
“It’s not outside the realm of possibility that other states that our governor has been flying immigrants to and dropping them off might be doing some quid pro quo -- and both are wrong," said Woodall. "It’s wrong. These folks are not pawns to be used to make a political point.”
But neither she nor Kearney can say for sure what did or didn’t happen.
In many ways, Tallahassee is both an outlier, and an example of the statewide problem. It’s long attracted unhoused people because it has resources to help, coupled with its geography.
Johnna Coleman is the executive director of the Big Bend Continuum of Care, which oversees homeless services in 8 counties.
“We’re in a high-traffic, transient area," she said. "So we’ve always seen people come in, whether that’s because of our closeness to I-10, whether it’s speculated that people are told that there’s a free-for-all at Kearney Center -- whatever the reasoning may be, we’ve seen that.”
She agrees that people searching for housing do best by looking in their own areas and should contact the CoC there.
“...because our focus is on the people who are currently in our system, and those people are prioritized accordingly," said Coleman. "And if you come in, then you become a little bit later down that list, right?”
In Florida, according to HUD data, the number of families with children experiencing homelessness grew 21.6 percent -- or 14-hundred families -- from 2022 to 2023. A main driver of homelessness is rising costs, both for housing, and for other daily needs.
“The people who are most affected are those people who show up thinking that they’re going to have somewhere to lay their head," said Coleman, "not knowing that they’re already coming to an already burdened community."
Coleman says she has seen a lot of cruelty in her work. And that the poorest people, the most vulnerable, are almost always the ones on the receiving end.
