Street Sweepers

After a little more than a month of the new routine, Garcia says, 469 homeless people have come to the HAC after being warned of possible arrest; of those, 129 agreed to enter some form of long-term rehabilitation. (The Miami Police Department doesn't keep separate statistics on arrests of homeless people; these numbers are expected to increase, but officers assigned to NET offices say that so far they're more likely to resort to warnings.) It's too early to tell what percentage of those brought to the HAC will make a serious attempt to get off the street, cautions Lynn Summers, executive director of Community Partnership for Homeless, which operates the HAC. "Are they just hanging out here until the heat is off and then going back?" she wonders. "It's going to take 18 to 24 months before we know how this is working." One thing of which she is already sure: Those coming in because of the new policy are different. "These are people who have been homeless for years and years and years. The hard core."

Most of Miami's hard-core homeless are well known to Garcia and her outreach workers, who have seen them in and out of shelters and rehab programs over several years, always coming back to the home they know best: the street. Even if all the homeless people in Miami really wanted to come in and get clean, the system couldn't begin to accommodate them. There are more shelter spaces in Dade than ever -- 921 beds, by the latest Dade County Homeless Trust count. But that is still 241 fewer than needed, according to statistics compiled by the Trust. And even after they've spent the maximum time (30 to 60 days) in an emergency shelter, the formerly homeless face a far worse shortage of transitional and permanent housing.

Police treatment of vagrants prompted the original class-action lawsuit against the City of Miami, filed by ACLU lawyers in 1988. The suit came to be known as the Pottinger case, after its lead plaintiff, Michael Pottinger. Homeless people like Pottinger, and their advocates had become increasingly indignant over a series of sweeps and routs, often in preparation for big events like the Orange Bowl Parade or visits from dignitaries, during which police frequently burned or discarded the personal effects of street people. Pottinger alleged that while the city had a policy of illegally arresting the homeless for performing necessary daily activities in public, it had no policy of providing alternatives to street life. The suit also sought to stop the destruction of their possessions.

In 1991 U.S. District Court Judge C. Clyde Atkins caused a sensation by ruling in favor of the plaintiffs. "The judge said if you're going to interfere in people's lives and arrest them, at the same time offer them a place to go, like a quid pro quo of civic responsibility," says Arthur Rosenberg, a Florida Legal Services attorney who worked on the case.

In a more controversial move, Atkins ordered the city to create two or more "safe zones" where the homeless could live as normally as possible. The city appealed Atkins's ruling, which halted the implementation of his order. Thus Miami never formally established any safe zones, but officials nevertheless adopted a hands-off policy toward the homeless. This resulted in fewer arrests and property seizures, as well as the development of sprawling, near-autonomous homeless camps. "The police were under a lot of pressure," recalls Livia Garcia. "Many officers became so scared of getting into trouble that they just stopped having anything to do with them. If they saw something illegal, they figured out it was safer just to walk away."

Regardless of the standoff between the city and the ACLU, and the slow pace of the lawsuit, its mere existence proved to be a catalyst, in many ways unprecedented in the nation. In 1993, after local bureaucrats proved unable to cope with the enormity of cleaning up a contaminated, crime-ridden homeless encampment called the Mud Flats, Gov. Lawton Chiles appointed a commission to find a solution to Dade's homeless problem. Later that year county voters approved a one-percent restaurant tax to underwrite homeless services, the first such dedicated source of funding anywhere in the nation. The county's Homeless Trust was established to oversee a system of care, and the downtown 350-bed HAC was built with eight million dollars in private donations and public funds (another nearly identical facility opened this past October in South Dade).