It’s not a bad joke, it’s a bad idea. Miami may dump homeless on an island | Editorial
It sounded like some kind of sick joke at first, but it’s true: Miami is considering moving its homeless people to an island.
Putting them in a camp, next to a sewer plant, on Virginia Key out in Biscayne Bay.
The comparisons were instantaneous, vicious — and hard to disregard. Internment camp. Penal colony. Awful, shameful images, even as Miami aspires to be the city of the future.
We could go on. The internet certainly did, when the news broke that the Miami City Commission might actually entertain this offensive possibility. No matter how temporary this move is supposed to be — it’s billed as a “transition zone” — it feels like one more attempt in Miami to push the homeless out of sight.
Invisibility is already a problem for the poor; this would have the potential to make it many magnitudes worse. Miami was just sued by Legal Services of Greater Miami, Southern Legal Counsel, and the American Civil Liberties Union over the treatment of people living on the streets.
But here’s the bigger question we want answered: Why would it ever have to come to this? This community has spent years and enormous sums of money to work with the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust (which strongly opposes the “transition zone” idea) and other groups to come up with plans designed to help the homeless, not shunt them aside. What about the Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery and the Chapman Partnership? Or Miami Mayor Francis Suarez’s “functional zero” plan, touted during his reelection campaign, to use $7 million in federal American Rescue Plan money bring virtually all Miami’s homeless population in from the streets?
Still, somehow, the top choice of Miami city staff members — who were asked to come up with proposals on the issue — was to relocate the city’s homeless to a site on northeastern Virginia Key. (Another possible location: Miami Parking Authority lots under Interstate 95 in downtown.) Their plan is modeled after projects in other U.S. cities — but, as a Miami Herald story points out, other cities didn’t put their homeless on an island.
Miami Commissioner Joe Carollo first floated the possibility of Virginia Key in 2021, part of a package of ideas on how to deal with the city’s homeless population. Despite criticism, he won commission backing for an ordinance that put pressure on homeless people by banning encampments on public property. He said residents were complaining about the homeless blocking sidewalks, littering and leaving urine and feces behind, issues that, indeed, must be addressed.
The city has long struggled with the issue. A class-action lawsuit over police harassment of the homeless led to a federal consent decree, the Pottinger agreement, that was in place for 20 years, preventing Miami police from arresting homeless people for loitering and other “life-sustaining” activities. When a federal judge dissolved the agreement in 2019, he said the city had changed its attitude toward the homeless population and had services for them. Now, it sounds like we are going backward.
We understand Miami has a tough problem, one shared by many other cities. Residents should be free to walk the streets without having to step around human waste or over people to get into shops. But packing up the homeless and putting them on an island so we don’t have to look at them — and, make no mistake, that’s the underlying goal here — isn’t the answer.
The answer is for our leaders, even if they are tired and frustrated by the problem, to look for other ways to help. Lashing out — as Carollo did last year, when he sarcastically proposed an “adopt-a-homeless” program for housing activists upset at his ideas — only tarnishes Miami’s image more.
The Homeless Trust has said, unequivocally, that it cannot support any homeless encampment without jeopardizing programs and funding — $41 million — from the federal government. That should be reason enough, all by itself, to extinguish this idea, once and for all.
But if it’s not, consider the issue from the perspective of being humane and compassionate, traits often in short supply these days. If you really can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable members, Miami — the Magic City — is about to fall very, very short.
Miami city commissioners, don’t let that happen.
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