City of Miami commissioners are facing a July 23 vote to pass an ordinance that would make it easier to jail unhoused individuals sleeping on the streets. The proposed ordinance passed on first reading with modifications and will come before the commission for a second reading at Thursday's commission meeting.
The proposed city ordinance comes after the adoption of the state’s encampment ban, also known as HB 1365, approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2024. Although the law has exacerbated the demand for rehousing, Florida’s FY 2025-26 budget allocated less funds to address homelessness than the FY 2023-24 budget, passed prior to the implementation of the ban, according to the Florida Policy Institute.
In the City of Miami, District 3 Commissioner Rolando Escalona’s proposal will allow police to forego issuing written warnings before arresting individuals for setting up public encampments. The officer must first deliver a verbal warning, providing a “reasonable amount of time” for the individual to remove their encampment. In the case that a shelter bed is available, it must be offered, but a refusal to accept would qualify as grounds for arrest.
Only District 5 Commissioner Christine King opposed the ordinance during first reading.
“I am opposed to any legislation that will make it more convenient for the houseless community to be criminalized,” Commissioner King told The Miami Times. “I believe that Commissioner Escalona sponsored this legislation from a place of wanting to do well for his community... [but] we have to govern from a place of compassion and humanity, and arrests do not fall into that category.”
King said she doesn’t believe the ordinance would reduce the unhoused population in any significant way. The legislation, in her eyes, is a “last resort,” although she did not name any specifics that would improve its efficacy.
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Miami-Dade County has the eighth-largest jail system in the U.S. On average, the Corrections and Rehabilitation Department is responsible for the custody of approximately 4,500 individuals incarcerated in three detention centers across the county. According to the county’s 2025 PIT (point-in-time) Census, the total number of people experiencing homelessness in Miami-Dade County rang in at 3,728. The Corrections and Rehabilitation Department’s budget is also over five times that of the Homeless Trust, although both entities serve similar percentages of the county’s population.
David Peery, founder and executive director of the Florida Coalition to Advance Racial Equity, or FCARE, has organized rallies, protests and press conferences that challenge policies seeking to criminalize homelessness. He was one of the leading voices against the proposed ordinance at the July 9 commission meeting.
“The direct administrative cost of jailing a person is about 300% of the daily cost of housing them,” said Peery during a phone call after the meeting. “Criminalization is really an expensive way to make homelessness worse. Trying to make a social justice issue into a criminal justice matter is entirely inappropriate.”
According to the county’s Department of Corrections, the full operating cost per inmate is around $30,000 in FY 2025-26. According to Peery, an unhoused individual can be put in supportive housing for roughly $30 a day, or $10,950 a year.
Shelter beds, like those provided for in the proposed ordinance, do not often lead to long-term housing solutions, said Peery. He emphasized that residents can still be homeless while working a full-time job.
“Shelters are fairly effective for people who are situationally homeless,” he said. “But for the chronically homeless — people who have been on the streets for a year or more — shelters are just temporary solutions... We have a deficit of permanent supportive housing, and [shelter beds] often recycle people right back onto the streets again.”
Three years ago, the City of Miami Beach approved legislation similar to this month’s proposed City of Miami ordinance. The Miami Beach ordinance allows a law enforcement officer to arrest unhoused individuals engaged in public camping or sleeping, with an exception if there is no immediate government assistance available.
The Miami Beach ordinance came into effect in the second half of 2023, and unsheltered homelessness decreased 13% from 2023 to 2024. However, that change was coupled with a 16% increase of unsheltered homelessness within the City of Miami in the same time frame. Peery stated that the two statistics are directly related.
“What’s happening is that they’re simply dumping their homelessness crisis on the City of Miami,” he said.
Peery opposes the Miami Beach ordinance not only because it’s a “fake process,” as he called it, but because he believes it has county-wide implications, pushing unsheltered individuals from one municipality to another. He fears the same will occur with the proposed City of Miami ordinance.
“People are downplaying it,” said Peery. “[Commissioner Escalona] keeps saying there’s no major change here because the police can’t arrest unless the homeless are offered a shelter bed... But what this threatens to do is make us [have] the same kind of phony, illusory bed check process that the City of Miami Beach has.”
Peery pointed out that unsheltered people often return to where they were arrested because “that’s where they’re familiar with.” Despite Miami Beach’s “issue with mass arrest,” he said, the prevalence of homelessness within its city limits persists.
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Michael Langley, executive director of the Florida Justice Institute, also spoke against the proposed ordinance during the July 9 commission meeting. During his testimony, he stated that care for the homeless is “more than just a moral stance; it’s an economic imperative.”
Like Peery, Langley mentioned that “many of those without permanent housing throughout Florida are working but aren’t making enough to reach” the economic threshold of affordability.
“This proposal would criminalize them for their inability to afford the basics,” said Langley. “We know that these punitive approaches are ineffective, costly and exacerbate homelessness... We need to be transformational, not transactional.”
Matthew Pastewski, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who works with the Miami Street Medicine team, also opposed the ordinance.
“Homelessness is not a housing issue,” argued Pastewski. “It is a medical condition created by social determinants of health... Jail makes medical problems worse. People lose access to medications. They lose follow-up appointments, documents, belongings, phones and trust. They often leave sicker, more disconnected, and end up back on the street.”
According to City of Miami Police Chief Edwin Lopez, enforcement of this ordinance would be a “last resort.” He stated that there have been only two arrests for encampments in the City of Miami this year thus far.
“The goal is not to arrest anybody,” said Commissioner Escalona during the July 9 meeting. “I understand what it is, being homeless. But we also need to be honest... I understand that people go through situations in life, but we are providing the resources that are needed for them to go to shelter. We are providing resources, not only beds, but we are [also] providing way more than that.”
Escalona’s communications team declined to give further comment to The Miami Times by the time of this publication.
This story was produced by The Miami Times, one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in the country, as part of a content sharing partnership with the WLRN newsroom. Read more at miamitimesonline.com.
