As the homeless law takes effect, what is Tampa Bay doing to prepare?

CLEARWATER — Kathy Hamm straightened her Police Department cap in the rearview mirror and shifted her van into drive, ready for another day of tough questions.

“Ms. Kathy, do you know of any affordable places to live?”

“How do I get into a shelter?”

“Can you help me find a motel room?”

There was Mountain Dew in her center console for energy, wet wipes for germs and a special disposable box for discarded needles she’d find. There were water bottles. And there was a cot in the back, because sometimes she’d find parents with babies sleeping in the woods or tucked behind buildings.

Hamm, 61, isn’t a cop. She doesn’t carry a badge or a gun. She’s a social worker, the Clearwater Police Department’s first in-house social services specialist, spending her days darting among shelters, street corners, parks, parking lots, churches and motels.

She was hired two years ago to serve as a bridge connecting law enforcement, nonprofits and people experiencing homelessness. She knows what it’s like to bounce between motels and friends’ couches for months on end.

And still, she has dedicated decades to helping in a city that, like much of the rest of Tampa Bay, has felt the tightening grip of an affordability crisis.

Her role was a partnership she and her colleagues agreed had become all the more important as confusion and concern swirled all summer on the streets: “What about this new law, Ms. Kathy? What’s going to happen on Oct. 1?”

Those questions had loomed across Florida since Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a ban on people camping in parks, on sidewalks and in other public spaces in the spring, calling it a solution to communities “plagued” by homelessness. It went into effect Tuesday.

The law empowers citizens, businesses and the attorney general to sue local governments that fail to remove people.

Tampa Bay’s three largest cities — Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater — say the law will not significantly alter their police departments’ practices. Each already has ordinances prohibiting public camping and sleeping.

“We take a proactive approach with our community outreach,” said Clearwater Police Major Nate Burnside, pointing to Hamm, who joined the department in October 2022 after more than two decades working in social care and case management.

“I don’t think there’s anyone in our city who is homeless and hasn’t heard of her. With this law, there’s really nothing that’s going to change for us.”

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Still, in the run-up to October, uncertainty about the law’s implementation and impact rippled throughout Tampa Bay. Here, demand for housing has rapidly outpaced supply since the pandemic, and case workers, housing experts and people experiencing homelessness said existing resources were already spread thin.

“The politicians have not done a good job other than fearmongering,” said social worker Scott Labuda, who connects people experiencing homelessness in Tampa with health and housing resources. He hopes the law will motivate local governments to increase shelter beds and housing supply. “Right now, there are so few places to send people in need.”

In Pinellas County, where 2,110 people are homeless on a single night, according to this year’s point-in-time homeless count, the Sheriff’s Office led a controversial multiagency effort to track where people were sleeping ahead of the law’s arrival, the Tampa Bay Times previously reported. The agency said it wanted to make sure the county was ready to observe the law.

On any given day, four out of five of the county’s 1,873 shelter beds are taken.

In the last five years, while need has ballooned, the county has added 7% more beds, according to the Homeless Leadership Alliance of Pinellas.

Meanwhile, in Hillsborough County, the Sheriff’s Office recently declined to provide details on how the agency had been preparing for the law. County housing officials declined to comment, too. Spokesperson Chris Wilkerson said that was because staff was waiting to present more information to county commissioners on Oct. 16.

Hillsborough has less than half as many shelter beds as Pinellas. On average, almost 90% of the 850 beds are occupied.

Tampa Mayor Jane Castor is “neutral” on the law, a recent statement said. “This won’t change anything in Tampa, because encampments have never been allowed here.”

Word about the law spread fast on the streets. Concern, too.

“There was a lot of misinformation being passed around,” Hamm said behind the wheel, driving from one site that hands out free food to another.

“They thought we were just going to scoop them all up in vans,” she said. “They were afraid to eat a free meal because they thought we’d arrest them on sight.”

That was where she came in, she thought. To help people keen to get off the streets, and to build trust.

She rarely wore sunglasses because she knew eye contact was important. She stood close to people when she listened — too close, one sergeant told her. She carried cigarettes in her pocket, sometimes offering them in exchange for panhandling signs to move people along.

“Leave the world a better place,” she liked to remind herself and her six grandchildren.

It took time to adjust to the department. She noticed how people would tense when they saw her police van. She learned to survey her surroundings for dangers, which she remembered on a mid-September day as she parked and stepped into a stretch of woods nestled by a bike path in the south of the city. Smashed glass crushed underfoot.

“I guess that could be used as a weapon against me,” she said, brushing cobwebs from her path.

She spotted a tent tucked within the trees. Inside was a jumble of bedding, including a pair of denim shorts that made Hamm think a woman lived there. There were blankets made of woven-together plastic bags, which she knew were handed out by members of a local congregation. Last year, Clearwater code enforcement staff cleared 171 encampments. So far this year, they’d cleared about a third of that.

No people here today, just signs of them.

Next she drove to a sunbaked lot beside an LA Fitness and a shuttered Pollo Tropical where a man was yelling from his wheelchair.

She recognized him as David Spagnuolo, 55, who’d spent years cycling through shelters, street corners, jail and emergency rooms. Lately, he said he’d spent most nights lowering himself from his chair and sleeping behind a gas station.

“Why are you out here hanging out?” Hamm said.

“We have permission from the owners,” he replied.

“You don’t,” she said.

He paused.

“I heard that you were homeless once, Kathy,” he said. “So how could you be like this?”

Housing advocates on both sides of Tampa Bay said they are approaching people sleeping outside and educating them on the law, along with where to find shelters and housing. In Pinellas, workers have been handing out resource cards. “There is hope,” they read.

The law allows municipalities to designate specific public property for camping or sleeping, but only under strict guidelines and with certification from the Department of Children and Families. Counties have to act first before cities can start such sites.

To date, neither Hillsborough nor Pinellas county has moved to make such designations for more shelters. Meanwhile, Pasco County purchased two acres for $775,000 as an emergency shelter earlier this year.

This year, Innovare Apartments in St. Petersburg began providing deeply discounted and free housing to get people into homes. In Hillsborough and Pinellas, Catholic Charities established shelters that include a mix of tents and tiny homes years before DeSantis signed this year’s legislation.

Still, Daisy Corea, chief executive officer of the Homeless Leadership Alliance of Pinellas, said resources remain tight.

“Plus, the end goal isn’t just to get someone into shelter, it’s to get them into long-term, stable, affordable housing,” she said. “We have a real shortage of that.”

Hamm knows this firsthand. She was working for the nonprofit Directions for Living in the summer of 2022 when her monthly rent jumped by $800. She found herself scrambling to keep a roof over her head, haunted by the same precarity as the people she served.

When the Police Department advertised their social services specialist role a few months later, she was bouncing among hotel rooms, her son’s home and her boyfriend’s.

She’d worked alongside officers for years and saw joining their team as an opportunity to strengthen community ties. She brought pages of questions to the job interview, keen on spending as much time in the streets and shelters as possible.

The month she started, she found a rundown Clearwater home she could afford. After work, she’d be up until 1 a.m. painting and cleaning, crashing on an air mattress.

She still keeps bubbled packaging material on the windows in the hope of lower energy bills.

Now, in the sunbaked lot with Spagnuolo, Hamm replied to him: “Because I changed my way of doing things so I didn’t stay out here.”

She wanted others to know that change was possible, too. That she was there to help.

She mentioned Pinellas Hope, a nearby shelter with tents, tiny homes, apartments, showers and a kitchen run by the Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg. The pair weren’t interested in a referral.

“OK, but y’all can’t be hanging around here,” Hamm said, and they shuffled away. Maybe next time, she thought.

Across the lot was a man tinkering with the car he was living in. Nearby, Larry Graham lifted the brim of his blue hat, revealing a malignant tumor above his right eye. He’d been on the streets since he left a bug-ridden rooming house, he said, where he’d pitched a tent inside his bedroom to try to stay clean.

Now he looked at Hamm.

“I know y’all help people,” he said. “One of my major needs right now is duct tape.”

He looked at his rickety old walker bundled high with belongings. The cushion was spilling foam. At least one wheel was broken, making pushing it through the afternoon sun even more of a slog.

His dog panted at his feet. He’d consider going to hospice, but that would mean giving up Lady Haley. No dogs allowed.

“She’s my everything,” he said. For now, they were together on the streets.

“Give me a little time,” Hamm said, placing a call to a thrift store before hopping in her van and driving 4 miles north.

Twenty minutes later, she was back with a shiny blue walker. She had pulled $50 out of her pocket for it and would later shrug it off to colleagues as just a few bucks.