A Crisis in Florida

For many Floridians, the homeless have become more and more visible in Florida in the past year. Impoverished individuals are more frequently seen at gas stations, parking lots, parks, intersections, and under highway overpasses.
A Crisis in Florida
Stewart Kern waits to apply for food stamps at the Cooperative Feeding Program on Feb. 10, 2011, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The food stamp program was used by 43.6 million people in November 2010. Before the 2008 recession, the program was serving 26 million. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
1/5/2012
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img class="size-large wp-image-1794166" src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/108969946.jpg" alt="Number Of People Receiving Government Food Assistance At Historic High" width="328"/></a>
Number Of People Receiving Government Food Assistance At Historic High

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—For many Floridians, the homeless have become more and more visible in Florida in the past year.

Impoverished individuals are more frequently seen at gas stations, parking lots, parks, intersections, and under highway overpasses.

“New faces have been exponentially increasing, and eight out of ten are brand new cases, whereas before it was six out of ten,” said Sean Cononie, director for the Homeless Voice Shelter in Hollywood, Fla.

The Homeless Voice newspaper is affiliated with the shelter of the same name, and provides distributor jobs to help people survive on the street, according to its website. Distributors of the Homeless Voice newspaper are ubiquitous.

Cononie works directly with people needing a place to live, and suggests the official numbers are almost certainly lower than reality. “For every official documented count of a homeless person out there it is counted as three, as most of them are just crashing elsewhere. The official count is nowhere near the real picture,” said Cononie.

He said it is common for poor people to avoid staying in a shelter. “Many who are considered a normal, functional person will not go to a shelter as there are rules, regulations, and classes that they are required to participate in, and some will get the sense of being in prison,” Cononie said.

Since the beginning of the 2008 recession, Florida has experienced the largest increase in poverty, according to a report from the Research Institute on Social & Economic Policy (RISEP). Mississippi has the worst poverty rate in the country, at 22.4 percent. Florida is at a 52-year high, with a poverty rate of 16.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey. The national poverty rate is 15.3 percent.

The research states that in Orlando, the number of children living in poverty has risen by about 50 percent, from 82,000 to 116,000 since the start of the recession. In south Florida, especially in Lee, Collier, Miami-Dade, and Alachua counties, a quarter of the children live in poverty; in Broward and Palm Beach, about 20 percent.

Sarasota is a city on the Gulf coast that has had a dramatic 62 percent increase in poverty over the past four years. An estimated 1,200 elementary school students are homeless. Tampa, a city about 60 miles north of Sarasota, had a whopping increase—from 15 percent to 40 percent—of children who are in poverty.

The nation’s official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent, according to data from Current Population Survey (CPS), 2011 Annual Social and Economic Supplement, the source for official poverty estimates.

This number increased from 14.3 percent in 2009, the third consecutive annual increase. There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, up from 43.6 million in 2009, the fourth consecutive annual increase and the largest number in the 52 years the survey has tracked.

Doris Dalrymple, executive director of Pass It On Ministries, Inc. of Miami, said she has seen people who have never asked for help before. “This year alone I have seen people from all walks of life coming here to us for food that haven’t visited us in the past,” Dalrymple said.

“In the past year alone we have experienced double-digit increases and I do not see it getting better. This is all engendered by lack of employment and the mortgage situation, as an enormous number of people are being evicted from their homes,” she said.

A contributing factor is lower real median household income, which declined from 2009 to 2010, according to the CPS.

“We have been serving our community for 30 years … We not only help in emergencies but we help resolve the situation that put these people in the emergencies. We also help organizations that want to develop funding and we try to work with universities and colleges,” said Dalrymple. Pass It On Ministries, Inc. of Miami, Fla., is an all-volunteer food pantry in Miami-Dade county. It provides people with food in emergency situations.