WHEN GOV. RON DeSantis needed a place to host a signing ceremony for a bill banning homeless people from sleeping in public, the Florida Republican chose Miami Beach. It wasn’t picked just for its iconic beach and breakers.
Last September, Miami Beach enacted a similar prohibition on public sleeping, which DeSantis praised at the March ceremony as a compassionate measure that would also keep the streets “clean” and “safe.”
It’s been a selling point for South Florida. Republican Miami Mayor Francis Suarez bragged last year, during his brief presidential campaign, that because of the city’s “different approach” to the issue of homelessness, there were only about 600 unsheltered people in Miami. Oh, you can see homeless people here. Plenty of them if you want to, in downtown, near the beaches, and around popular tourist spots like the Wynwood neighborhood. But it’s not like walking through Washington, D.C., or Portland, Oregon, where underpasses and public parks are stuffed with tents.
This is partly a shell game played by local authorities. The Miami Police Department has an ominously named “Homeless Empowerment Assistance Team” (HEAT) that clears tent camps, and the city recently paid a $300,000 settlement to end a lawsuit over improperly trashing homeless people’s property, including an urn containing the ashes of a woman’s mother. There are local and county ordinances to make life tougher for people living on the street, and at one time the county was considering a grotesque proposal to move them onto a small island next to a wastewater treatment plant.
But Miami has managed to avoid large-scale chronic homelessness—and Ron Book, the chair of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, will tell you with a straight face that if a few things break his way, he will end homelessness altogether in the county in under two years.
In addition to chairing the trust—the government agency that coordinates funding and delivery of homeless aid in the county—Book is a prominent lobbyist and attorney, so he has a lot of practice in the field of confident speaking. But he also says he has the numbers to back his claim up.
In the early 1990s, more than 8,000 people were camping on the streets and sidewalks of Miami-Dade County.
“When I started 32 years ago, we were in a similar place to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, Washington, D.C.,” Book says. “We
