Editor, The Beacon:
While at Manzano’s recently, I overheard a gentleman say, “This is a cute little town.” I turned around and said I’ve never heard that description before of DeLand. He said he was from Clearwater and asked me if I knew where that was. Told him, yes I did. He said it was a much bigger town. I said I agreed.
My point is that perspective changes by position.
Some perspectives see that “cute little town” as gone away, permanently. There are other opinions of that perspective that say that DeLand is still “that town.”
Jim Connell
Lake Helen
Bum City is a much more accurate description of what is seen every day here in what was once known as Delight DeLand.
If you know, you know.
more and more homeless people everywhere you go, throwing trash wherever they squat, constantly begging for money, and when you don’t give they curse you out, the police ride by them every day and do nothing to discourage them I quit walking downtown, because of the constant harassment. they are at every entrance to the shopping plaza, no Deland is not cute
Deland has a cute downtown but it also has a homelessness problem. There is little the police can do. If arrested, the homeless are typically released the next day. After stopping at the county jail, Votran’s next stop is Deland. The growing homeless problem is an issue that has to be solved by some kind of community effort. Perhaps an advisory committee of concerned citizens and city officials should discuss and recommend a solution. It’s a tough issue which doesn’t have an easy fix.
On a recent Saturday morning, I walked through the downtown with a friend visiting from Debary. His comment: “I feel like I’m in New York with all the homeless people.”
It is no longer the cute little/quaint town that it once was – the influx of new residents, the influx of new construction and the tearing down of wooded areas and now with more flooding than we have ever had as a result of the same