It has been more than eight months since Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs and Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer remained silent as the Commission on Homelessness recommended that it “cease to exist.” In this open letter, the Mayors were urged to lead on the issue; however, the community has only seen limited action and an increasing crisis building. It has also been five months since reports that 10,000 Central Florida students returning to schools were homeless.
Just last week, more than 15 homeless men and women were sleeping at 5pm along Lake Dot, the soon-to-be-home of Mayor Dyer’s pet project Creative Village. Just a few blocks down the road, a homeless couple pushed a shopping cart across Orange Avenue. Continuing just a few stoplights, homeless men slept along the storefronts of Colonial.
The problem is all around us. Yet our leaders are silent.
It is a sad commentary that the City Beautiful is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on venues projects like the Performing Arts Center with so many struggling right in its shadow. Walk around Lake Lucerne just blocks away from the DPAC construction site and you will often find some of our homeless neighbors trying to find warmth and rest on the benches.
It will also be interesting to see if Orlando city leaders continue to allow Food Not Bombs to hold their public food sharing outside of City Hall when the new Performing Arts Center opens.
The fact remains that local leaders are not taking our homeless problem seriously and they are definitely not providing a public vision and path forward for our community to address this local crisis. Once again, Central Florida, the tourism capital of the world, and supposedly the “happiest place on Earth,” is better than this.
