Amid a continuing increase in the number of individuals who are living on the streets in DeLand, the City Commission on Jan. 17 approved three ordinances aimed at getting people off the streets and directly in front of the services they need.

“The population, both housed and unhoused, has boomed in DeLand, and it’s reached the point where we have to do something,” Mayor Chris Cloudman said.

The city’s new tough-love-style approach, city officials said, will see law enforcement leading the charge of getting unhoused individuals off the streets and to shelters. If they refuse help, they could be arrested. 

Ultimately, the goal of the new approach, city officials said, is to be compassionate.

“The idea is not to approach this from, ‘Alright, here we come with our billy clubs, and we’re loading you up in a van and taking you away,’” City Attorney Darren Elkind explained. 

The three-pronged approach is this: 

— an “anti-camping” ordinance aimed at relocating individuals who are asleep on public property in Downtown DeLand to a local homeless shelter,

— an ordinance cracking down on “unlawful storage of personal property” to make it harder for unhoused individuals to leave bags and shopping carts of belongings in public spaces, 

— and an ordinance targeting individuals who are lying on public property like benches or streets.

DeLand isn’t reinventing the wheel; instead, city officials are building on the experience of other cities who’ve done the same.

“This is a studied framework,” City Attorney Darren Elkind told the City Commission. “[I]t’s tried and true, and we’re hopeful it’s going to achieve the desired results both for the community and, specifically, for the folks who are suffering with homelessness.”

This new approach marks a paradigm shift for the City of DeLand. Collectively, city officials and residents have determined that allowing people to live on the streets — even making it easier for them to do so with food or blankets — is not compassionate.

Rather than individual organizations or individual people trying to make a difference, Neighborhood Center Chief Operating Officer Waylan Niece said, DeLand is now taking a comprehensive approach.

Acknowledging the need for that wasn’t easy, he said. His desire had long been to keep bureaucracy far away, but, Niece said, it’s impossible to ignore that there are more people on the streets now than there were five years ago.

“I fought my ass off for years fighting these types of ordinances,” he said. 

But it’s not compassionate, Niece said, to let people continue to live on the streets.

“… over the past few years, as I’ve seen the progression of this,” he said, “I’ve realized that these types of things, these types of ordinances, these types of meetings, this type of community support, all of us working together to tackle an issue is compassion.”

A step up

City staff and officials have been hard at work crafting new policies for months as DeLandites, on social media and in other public forums, have repeatedly asked the city to “do something” about the greater number of individuals seemingly living on the streets of Downtown DeLand.

The new policies are what the city hopes will be not just a compassionate approach, but a constitutional one, too. The new measures include cooperation with an organization the city has not previously partnered with.

First Step Shelter at 3889 W. International Speedway Blvd., midway between DeLand and Daytona Beach, opened in 2019 with support from Volusia County and municipalities on the county’s east side. Today, its partners include nearly every city on the county’s east side. The proposed new relationship with DeLand would be the shelter’s first in West Volusia.

“We are really very excited about things moving forward with DeLand,” Executive Director Victoria Fahlberg told The Beacon. “We would really value that partnership.”

DeLand would value the partnership, too, in part because its new policies wouldn’t be possible — from the perspective of manpower or legality — without First Step’s support.

Case law requires the city to offer an alternative before arresting someone, for example, for sleeping on the streets.

“You cannot make it a crime to be homeless,” Elkind explained. “You can’t arrest somebody, prosecute somebody for sleeping, or camping, or living in a public place if there is nowhere else for them to go.”

The 30 beds at The Bridge homeless shelter in DeLand are almost always full, and First Step would be, as Elkind put it, the “realistic alternative” the city needs.

If an individual is asleep on a bench in Downtown DeLand, or found camping or sleeping on public property, police officers can ask them if they have somewhere to go. If they do not have any place to go, they can next offer to take them to either The Bridge or First Step.

First Step has more capacity, in the form of a covered outdoor sleeping area called the Safe Zone.

“The thing that we offer that The Bridge doesn’t offer is the Safe Zone,” Fahlberg explained.

The Rose Ann Tornatore Safe Zone at First Step is a space where individuals can rest for 24 hours, get a hot meal, and then be on their way. It was designed for people who aren’t ready to commit to a program to turn their life around, but still need a safe place to sleep.

The Safe Zone is available to those who either can’t or don’t want to meet the requirements of more-intense programs.

“To come into our program, people have to agree to abide by the rules,” Fahlberg said, “to seek the services they need, to save their income, to go into housing eventually.”

The only criteria for staying in the Safe Zone, she said, is that people be able to physically move, and that they not be a registered sex offender.

Once a person’s 24 hours are up, First Step staff ask if they would like to formally join the shelter’s program, and if they do not, they receive a meal and are asked to leave. While the shelter isn’t near much, a Votran bus station is right outside.

This will be the case for those who accept an officer’s offer of a ride to a shelter. If someone has nowhere to go, and turns down that trip, the DeLand Police can arrest them. 

It may sound punitive, city officials said, but the hope is that repeated contact with social services — with arrest as the alternative — will lead people to eventually agree to change.

“The only way we’re going to get them to the help they need is we’re going to have to force it,” City Manager Michael Pleus said. “We’re just going to have to stay at it for a while. The hope is, over time, with the number of contacts the people have with First Step and The Bridge, they’ll decide well maybe I’ll give it a shot.”

Working with First Step means helping the shelter facilitate the increased number of visitors it anticipates from DeLand. If the City Commission approves, DeLand will pay First Step $69,000, an amount calculated as a specific percentage of the city’s budget. 

Getting everyone on board

DeLand’s new approach to helping people get off the streets won’t work, city officials said, unless everyone is on the same page. Organizations like The Neighborhood Center and First Step, Pleus said, have more tools to help people get their lives together than any one individual can offer.

“In order for this to work, we can’t still have merchants Downtown feeding them out the back door, or allowing them to reside in or around their business,” Pleus said. “We need to help them at the places that are designed, and have the resources, to help them navigate the re-entry challenges.”

Speaking on behalf of himself and nearly 70 Downtown business owners who signed a letter in support of the new ordinances, Elusive Grape owner Bill Budzinski said they’re on board.

“We will be actively promoting that we’re helping the homeless,” he said. “We are not vilifying them … they don’t need to live on our streets. No one needs to live on the street. Anything that we can do collectively to help them is a benefit.”

From his business at 129 N. Woodland Blvd., Budzinski has seen the dramatic increase in the number of homeless individuals. He’s supportive of the ordinances, he said, because he worries that if the city doesn’t act now, the number of unhoused people could only grow.

“This is a good step,” he said. “It’s not perfect, but, compassionately, it’s the way to go.”

It’s not just about the safety of the people living on the street, it’s about the safety and flow of commerce for everyone else in Downtown DeLand, too, Aaron Price said.

Price lives at and owns property on West Indiana Avenue, right in the heart of Downtown DeLand. He has made repeated calls to the DeLand Police Department because he and his family felt unsafe, he said.

“Just because they have a right to a bench, or whatever, what about the residents who work so hard for this town to be as good as it is?” Price asked city commissioners. “It’s a safety issue as much as it is a compassion issue.”

Another perspective

These new ordinances won’t solve homelessness, City Commissioner Jessica Davis said, but she hopes they can at least be a step in the right direction. 

Truly solving homelessness, Volusia/Flagler County Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Harry Cole said, would mean reshaping the area’s housing landscape.

“There needs to be more affordable housing, more permanent, supportive housing where people who are very low-income or no-income can go,” he told The Beacon. “This is going to Band-Aid the problem, and it may hide it a little more.”

Cole said he’s hopeful that these measures — and similar ones in Daytona Beach, New Smyrna Beach and Altamonte Springs — help people, but he remains concerned about the effectiveness of an approach that makes law-enforcement officers the first people unhoused individuals interact with.

“I think in the long run, they’re going to find out that just having a law-enforcement type approach is not going to work and help solve the problem,” Cole said. “That approach does one thing — it … moves people to another jurisdiction so it’s not in your backyard, but the problem is still there.”

And while skeptical, he remained confident that organizations like First Step and The Neighborhood Center could work well together. At the end of the day, Cole said, he believes the most important thing is getting a roof over someone’s head.

Worsening conditions
There’s no one factor to blame, but it’s a fact that there are more people experiencing homelessness now than there were before 2020.
Four years ago, Volusia County was reducing the number of people without stable housing, Neighborhood Center of West Volusia Chief Operating Officer Waylan Niece told the DeLand City Commission Jan. 17. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, however, things have continued to worsen.
Each year, the Volusia/Flagler County Coalition for the Homeless oversees what’s called a Point in Time Count to pin down the number of people living without housing. In 2023, that count determined that, based on the number of individuals visibly living on the street — not counting less-visible or hard-to-reach people — the number of people experiencing homelessness had increased over 2022 by around 20 percent.
There’s not just one factor causing that rise, but with the cost of necessities like housing, groceries and transportation higher now than before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are still struggling.
Wages haven’t been keeping up with the increases in the cost of living, coalition Executive Director Harry Cole told The Beacon, and the Coalition for the Homeless continues to see new clients who have never been on the streets before.
With the 2024 Point in Time Count underway, Cole said he doesn’t want to predict a negative outcome, but it’s possible that 2024’s numbers will be even worse than 2023’s.
“I don’t want to predict,” he said, “but the way things are with the economy, the cost of living, the cost of food, the cost of a one- or two- [bed] apartment … it’s really astronomical right now.”

Next steps

The City Commission unanimously passed all three new ordinances on first reading, and the next step is for each ordinance to be approved a second time. Once approved, the ordinances will become law in DeLand.

Once the agreement between the city and First Step is finalized, attorney Elkind said, DeLand Police will be trained in what the new rules allow them to do, and how best to give people a hand up, rather than turning a blind eye.