Winter Park Homeless Solutions

We love Winter Park for many reasons including great public schools, low crime rates, a popular family-friendly downtown scene, and few vagrants panhandling or camping on public property. So, why does Winter Park have so few homeless people walking about? It's because their local government has been empowering their police department to escort homeless people out of Winter Park for decades! 

Now, Winter Park has become blatant about this policy. Their local government applied for and was just granted a 250K federal grant to more efficiently take homeless people out of Winter Park. The narrative they are spreading is that this program allows them to fund two new sworn in officers and two vehicles, whose primary focus is to drive around Winter Park looking for people experiencing homelessness and take them to the social services they need. This program is called the Homeless Advocacy Response team. The thing is the resources and social services the Winter Park Police Department will be taking their people experiencing homelessness to are all outside of Winter Park (Source)! Many of the people holding executive positions or on boards for various homeless related services live in Winter Park. These people are the real NIMBYS, not in my backyard. One example is Lisa Portelli, who is Dyer's senior advisor on homelessness. She lives in Winter Park, and she was one of the biggest advocates and policy creators of the low-barrier open-access work release building homeless shelter idea.

In March 2025, the League of Women Voters of Orange County held a Hot Topics panel discussion in Winter Park where some of the key executives of homeless services shared some important insight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfApcCMZL60 The executive director for the Samaritan Resource Center, Zeynep Portway said, "What we were talking about in 2011, we are still talking about the same issues today, and this is 14 years later. It feels like there hasn't been any, other than funding thanks to Martha and HSN bringing more dollars into our area, I feel like there hasn't been any progress made in how to fix the problem. What we are seeing is just things getting worse out there."

Martha Are, CEO of the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness and the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida said, "Surprisingly data is a new thing in this field. So a lot of our job is now collecting data and then helping folks analyze that data to help drive our solutions." She goes on to say the new camping ban law's intent was to "pressure jurisdictions to do something, and by putting a penalty on jurisdictions it was supposed to inspire, encourage jurisdictions to create overnight sleeping accommodations for people. Obviously, another purpose is just to make people less visible and align visibility with success." I disagree. The purpose of the law was to give tax paying residents a way to hold their local governments accountable for not enforcing laws that have been around, in some municipalities, for decades!

Are continued by saying across the three counties, those who are under 18 and adults over 55 make up about 40% of people experiencing homelessness, but she didn't offer any of the research that led her to say those figures. What I know from being a resident of Sodo, who is very aware of the homeless people I see around, I have never seen a child begging for money next to their parents in my area, but I see middle aged people doing so everyday. Plus, I haven't spoken with a local patrolling police officer who said they regularly come across children experiencing homelessness. One Orange County officer who regularly attends the monthly Good Samaritan's Townhall on Homelessness related that in his decade experience working with homeless people, he has only come across a child living in the woods one time. 

Are says we need to spend more time focusing on why some communities have more people who are homeless than others. What's different at the community level versus what makes someone who's homeless different from somebody who's housed. Yet, here in Orlando, the highest concentration of people experiencing homelessness are naturally in areas where the city concentrates their homeless services! Are went on to say what we really need is more subsidised low income housing on a mass scale. She went so far to say, "Even if you got [a house] mortgage or debt free. The cost to operate rental units is such that people on a very low income can't pay enough in rent for you to operate that. We have to have subsidies to make housing affordable in our economy."

The moderator, Mark Brewer, then said the City of Orlando called off their Kaley homeless shelter project, "primarily because a group of people who said we think this is a great idea just not in my backyard." Wow. Really! I don't know a single person I've run into from the Stop SoDo Shelter movement saying the city's open access low barrier homeless shelter was a good idea. Personally, I thought it was a horrible idea regardless of where they put it! Portway went on to say," we make an effort to educate the general public about who these homeless folks are. Even if they are those who are chronically homeless or mentally ill or substance users, they are still people who need help." 

This is a great transition to what I believe is a major disdain between the way residents view homeless services. Most local politicians and homeless service providers prioritize using their resources to help people that need just a little help to get back on their feet as opposed to helping the chronically homeless or mentally ill or substance users. I can't fault this logic. I agree it makes a lot of sense to allocate resources in this way. However, the reason there are so many concerned neighbors voicing their dissatisfaction is because many of the homeless characters residents repeatedly see on the streets of SoDo and Paramore are those who don't want to go to any homeless shelter or program. They rather continue sleeping in the woods or on the streets. We know this from physically talking to many of them. 

The irony of this meeting circled all the way around when Are said if all neighborhoods and local municipalities each provided homeless services then we would all be in a better place, and homeless people wouldn't need to be moved around and relocated to large shelters. Finally, something I can agree with. Winter Park, please be part of the solution by taking care of your own homeless people instead of moving them to downtown Orlando!