Miami Beach passes new law allowing cops to ARREST homeless people who refuse to be placed in a shelter
Miami Beach has passed a controversial new law that gives police the power to arrest homeless people who refuse to go to a shelter.
The Florida hotspot, which is often visited by celebrities from Leonardo DiCaprio to Jared Leto, has seen a growing number of rough sleepers in recent years.
An estimated 152 people are currently homeless in the relatively small, star-studded neighborhood, according to the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust.
Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez, who voted in favor of the new law, said the shelter crisis has been accompanied by an increase in unsavory incidents in the city.
“These are people we see selling drugs, having sex outside the home, naked,” she told the newspaper New York Post.
“There’s defecation, there’s masturbation in front of our children in parks, open containers and parties, and shouting. They bother and they sting. And they refuse any kind of service.”
Miami Beach has passed a controversial new law that gives police the power to arrest homeless people who refuse to go to a shelter
The Florida hotspot, which is often visited by celebrities from Leonardo DiCaprio to Jared Leto, has seen a growing number of rough sleepers in recent years
Gonzalez emphasized that only people who refused housing from the city would be arrested.
“We want to help people,” she said. “But if people don’t want to help themselves, the state and federal government have given us no choice but to pass this ordinance.”
Along with Gonzalez, Mayor Dan Gelbe and commissioners Steven Meiner and Alex Fernandez voted in favor of the law. Commissioners Ricky Arriola, Laura Dominguez and David Richardson voted no.
Arriola told a Miami Beach City Commission meeting that “arresting people for being homeless is not the answer.”
“Creating a new crime category, which is essentially the category of homelessness, is not a solution,” he said.
Local store owner Betty Behar disagreed, saying she supported the measure because homelessness has been “a problem for some time” for business owners in the tourism-driven city.
“When the boardwalk took away the benches, they had to find a new house, so this became their home,” she said NBC6.
“They were either in the front of the businesses or in the back, sorting through trash or whatever. So it’s a problem, it’s been a problem for a while.”
An estimated 152 people are currently homeless in the relatively small, star-studded neighborhood, according to the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust.
Along with Gonzalez, Mayor Dan Gelbe and Commissioners Steven Meiner and Alex Fernandez voted in favor of the law. Commissioners Ricky Arriola, Laura Dominguez and David Richardson voted no
Miami Beach is a city on the east coast of Florida, where approximately 80,000 people live spread over approximately 13 square kilometers
Local store owner Betty Behar says she supports the new law because homelessness has been ‘an issue’ for business owners in the tourism-driven city for some time
Miami Beach is a city on the east coast of Florida, where approximately 80,000 people live spread over approximately 8 square miles.
It’s not the only city where the rise in homelessness has reached a ‘state of emergency’ – as similar housing crises have erupted in neighborhoods across the US, and California is by far the hardest-hit state.
The Golden State has the highest homelessness rate in the country, with 44 unhoused people per 10,000 residents. It is closely followed by Vermont, Oregon and Hawaii.
In San Jose, California, a Silicon Valley billionaire has resorted to leasing a five-acre plot of private land to the municipality for just $1 a year in an effort to combat the Bay Area’s housing crisis.
American real estate developer John Sobrato, 84, offered the San Jose City Council the opportunity to build a temporary solar-powered residential complex with 150 beds in Via Del Oro, Edenvale, in the south of the metropolis.
Similar scenes of poverty have been well documented in San Francisco, where hordes of brand names, including Whole Foods and Nordstrom, have recently left the city amid widespread crime and declining visitor numbers.