Broward homelessness advocates have concluded there’s too much resistance to create a new shelter in the county, including in cities where they say it would be most needed.
Massive pushback from cities has killed any hope of building a new county-funded homeless shelter in Broward for the foreseeable future, according to Rebecca McGuire, a manager with Broward’s Homeless Initiative Partnership Administration.
“I think we have to abandon the idea for now of having a [new homeless assistance shelter] anywhere in Broward County,” McGuire said at a meeting Tuesday, citing the pushback from cities.
The scrapped plans for a new shelter are just a symptom of the county’s deeper inability to grapple with homelessness. A resource crush spurred by COVID, the housing crisis and NIMBY-ism (‘not in my back yard’) has led to the reappearance of smaller tent cities around the county, according to McGuire.
Broward is home to at least 2,000 homeless folks, according to its most recent head count, a conservative estimate that captures just one moment in time.
After a Hollywood partner shelter backed out, Broward was left with two county-run shelters — the North Homeless Assistance Center in Pompano Beachand Central Homeless Assistance Center in Fort Lauderdale — plus a partnership with the Salvation Army. All told, those three shelters provide just 595 beds, McGuire said.
While an array of smaller private shelters in Broward can pick up some of the slack, a new center could have added anywhere from 300 to 400 beds. Without local approval, the shelter is a non-starter.
With a new shelter off the table, advocates have decided that their best bet is to get people into affordable housing as quickly as possible.
Facing opposition
As the county struggles to find a place to put up homeless people, some cities and their residents have sent a clear message that they will not be the destination for those seeking shelter.
“It’s not just the municipalities. It’s the neighbors, it’s the homeowner associations, it’s the businesses. There’s just not an appetite for a very large homeless assistance center right next to you,” McGuire said.
“There’s a lot of NIMBY-ism,” said Sandra Einhorn, chair of a subcommittee on needs and gaps for the county’s housing division.While shelters can get homeless people off the streets, Einhorn said she gets why some might not want chronically homeless folks — those that have been displaced in the long run, often because of mental health and drug issues — moving en masse to their neighborhood.
“I think that it’s not out of the realm of understanding to understand why someone would sort of balk at the idea of a homeless shelter being next door,” she said.
McGuire explained that Broward wasn’t nearly as dense when the county-operated shelters were built in 1998. “When we built the North [Homeless Assistance Center], there was nothing there. There was just this industrial area. And when we built the Central HAC, it was the result of a tent city that was right across the street; everybody wanted the tent city gone,” she said.
But times have changed. The county is rapidly running out of space to develop. And as the landscape has changed, so have attitudes.
There hasn’t been great precedent for communities’ desire for homeless shelters in South Florida. For example, years ago, Hollywood paid local advocate Sean Cononie $4.8 million to shut down his shelter, the Homeless Voice, and leave town for 30 years. At the time, Cononie took as many as 100 homeless folks with him on charter buses bound for Central Florida.
So where should Broward’s unsheltered people go?
Resource crush
The plans for a new shelter foundered under especially bad circumstances.
The affordable housing crisis is more pronounced in South Florida than almost anywhere else in the nation. Just 5% of families can afford Broward County’s median home price of $600,000, according to data presented at an affordable housing workshop last week. Rent is skyrocketing in parallel, forcing lower-income renters out of their places.
The crush from the affordable housing crisis on shelters is twofold. Not only are more people flocking to the shelters, but they are staying for months on end. The average stay at Broward’s Central Homeless Assistance Shelter was 247 days — over eight months, according to data from Tuesday’s meeting. The north center reported an average stay of 98 days. That’s longer than they have hung around historically, according to Einhorn. “People are being forced to stay longer because they can’t find anything that’s affordable for them,” she said.
Meanwhile, the shelters are still dealing with staffing shortages, leaving them hard-pressed to meet the demand for services, Einhorn said.
“If we don’t have enough people holding up the social service safety net, what happens? People fall through the net,” Einhorn said in an interview. And simply giving staff more cases to juggle isn’t an option, she said.
“You can’t ethically have a case manager taking on a case load of 100 cases,” she said. “So you’ve got some challenges with shelter bed capacity because of the staffing issue.”
And to top it off, the county lost its partnership withBroward Outreach, which operates The Caring Place in Hollywoodand provided 100 beds to the county, according to McGuire. A director at The Caring Place couldn’t be reached for comment.
With no real chance of opening a new temporary housing option, advocates have decided that their best bet is to go all in on affordable housing.
“You have to prioritize,” McGuire said. “Am I going to go and advocate for affordable housing or another shelter? I think affordable housing is going to win every single time.”
But it’s a major tide to reverse. From 2016 to 2020, the supply of rental units under $1,250 shrunk 28.7%, according to data from Broward County. While the overall supply of rental units actually increased during that time, all of those lost units were replaced by more expensive rental options.
The county currently has a pipeline of nine affordable housing projects expected to provide about 1,100 new units of affordable housing, with some reserved for seniors. Two more would rehabilitate an additional 180 units. But that doesn’t come close to making up for the 36,250 units under $1,250 that were lost.
Simply put, the county is tasked with placing people who often lack employment in rental units; in the least affordable rental market in the country; and with no signs that the tide will come back out.
As a stop-gap measure, the county is experimenting with paying $1,000 bonuses to landlords willing to house homeless folks. The extra compensation makes up for the risks associated with housing clients with bad credit scores, criminal records and other issues that would make them poor housing candidates to many private landlords. So far, 37 people have been placed this way, McGuire said.
While it’s a long road toward fixing Broward’s housing market, advocates still agree that the way out of the issue is to create affordable housing and shelter options.
“I would say in every meeting where we talked about homelessness that the solution to homelessness is affordable housing,” Einhorn said. “If we’re not making larger investments in housing, then we’re just sort of spinning our wheels.”
