As a member of the Christian Service Center’s board, I take pride in the progress we’ve made in recent years. Since 2022, our dedicated staff has provided housing for far over 1,000 individuals, which is an incredible accomplishment given that the Christian Service Center only provided housing for six individuals over the entire year in 2020. Over the past five years, we have helped hundreds of people with clothing, thousands of meals, and innumerable other services.
There are roughly 1,800 homeless people in Metro Orlando. We launched a brand-new initiative called 407 Connect last week. With the help of Mayor Buddy Dyer and city employees, 407 Connect operates two buses that can accommodate 42 passengers each night on our campus and other nearby places. Those who have jobs but no housing are the ones chosen to be clients for these busses. They will have the security, relaxation, and self-respect need to continue working if they have a safe location to sleep and store their belongings. They will also be able to accumulate money with the intention of moving into stable residence in a month or two. Following their transition, the cycle will be repeated by a new individual. The busses will tour throughout the day, departing campus to visit and demonstrate how other towns operate. With any luck, these excursions will spark interest in implementing a similar program in these other cities, creating a tiny but crucial haven of safety from sleeping on the streets for Central Florida’s homeless population. Solutions like these are more crucial than ever as the number of homeless people in our society rises.
Given that this is the first increase in shelter beds in the metro area in years, the 42 new beds are a success for our community. These buses are a positive move, but they only increase the number of beds available in metro Orlando to 950. We still have a long way to go before we can provide a safe alternative for everyone who sleeps on the streets or in their cars.
Rethinking the Kaley Street shelter is one possible solution to this issue. This would increase our inventory by more than 200 beds. Furthermore, this shelter would include essential services like case management, food, clothing, and health care in addition to just expanding the number of beds accessible to our homeless population.
The shelter would increase the number of homeless individuals in local neighborhoods, according to some who oppose the proposal. The shelter would rapidly fill with the local unhoused population that is already in the area, keeping them off the streets and out of the neighborhoods that currently feel overcrowded. Experience has shown that the majority of our homeless neighbors live within a few miles of where they lived before becoming homeless. Those who have a day off can spend it in their room or the courtyard and avoid going near Kaley Street because the building even has an inside courtyard.
Some claim that the shelter will bring too many disturbed people to their areas. While some homeless people struggle with drug and alcohol abuse, the proportion of homeless people who experience these problems is not significantly higher than that of the general population. Additionally, the data indicates that there is not a significant disparity in mental health problems between the homeless and the housed population, contradicting common beliefs about homelessness and mental health problems. Many of us struggle with mental health difficulties. The distinction is that homeless persons frequently face increasing difficulties as a result of living on the streets, where they are unable to obtain their medications or are compelled to exchange their medications for food. Many of these problems can be resolved by providing a safe and healthy place to stay.
The most economical method to address the shelter bed shortfall in our town right now is to open the Kaley shelter, which was built to house people and was used as a halfway house for convicts before closing. Long-term success is correlated with stability, according to numerous studies. Stability in this context refers to creating enough shelter space to provide our homeless people with a secure place to sleep, protection from the heat, and assistance with basic necessities. All of this would be possible in the Kaley Street shelter, and for a lot less money than constructing a new shelter somewhere else. Please lend your support to the attempts to bring this discussion back to life. We need a lot more beds, but forty-two is a start.
Orlando resident Michael Perkins serves on the Christian Service Center’s board.
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