Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  As the elephant heals, it forms a thick scab that cracks when I stretch it. My hip swells and is painful to touch and lie on. I’m gentle in the shower and clean it twice a day with a mild, sterile soap. I massage the elephant with moisturizing ointments and cover it with gauze. Eventually, it smooths over, becomes integrated.

  The Mayor of Williams Park

  At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?

  And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them,

  And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

  Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

  Matthew 18:1–4

  A line forms outside the Trinity Lutheran Church in St. Petersburg, Florida, each Saturday morning at six o’clock. Breakfast is at nine, and by that time the line will have snaked halfway around the brick building, down the narrow alleyway lined with Dumpsters and yellow-tinted, low-income apartments, and back around to where it began, on Fifth Street. For those three hours before the doors open, the people in line smoke and talk, sharing stories of where they slept the night before and who or what awoke them and forced them to move. Which of their friends and family is missing or dead, who is housed, if anyone, even temporarily. Who was arrested. They’re clean or dirty, black, white, Latino, sane or impaired, pregnant, disabled, old, young—and poor.

  At six thirty, a two-hundred-fifty-pound, six-foot-tall black man arrives and cuts to the front of the line. He breathes heavily and walks with difficulty, looking down at the ground or straight ahead. He wears a fedora and a clean button-down shirt. He is G.W. Rolle, the man who’s always on their side. They move to let him pass. Some greet or hug him. Some ask him for money or a smoke. He lingers while he finishes his cigarette, opens the church, and goes inside. He takes the elevator to the fellowship hall on the third floor. He goes to the kitchen and starts cooking.

  I arrive at eight o’clock on a warm July morning in 2015. G.W. is in the kitchen with four volunteers, all homeless or formerly so. Each cooks a part of the morning’s breakfast, frying eggs or sausage, seasoning home fries, cutting fruit salad or squares of cream cheese. On the way in, I pass a tall rolling rack of donated pastries, and two long plastic tables under a row of windows, and two boxes of plastic gloves. I’ve let G.W. know I’m in town to write a story about him, and he’s told me to come to the breakfast—he’ll have me serving grits. G.W. believes in service. When he got off the streets in 2006, he turned back around to help others up after him. Not everyone does that.

  G.W. is an ordained minister whose church, Missio Dei, has an office in the basement of Trinity Lutheran. Missio Dei describes itself1 as “an imperfect church of imperfect people inviting other imperfect people to find the perfect love.” When asked his denomination, G.W. says, “I identify as the hands and feet of Christ.”2 Each Saturday morning, he serves a free breakfast in the fellowship hall; each Sunday night, he serves a free dinner and gives a Missio Dei service in the small wooden sanctuary. Attending services isn’t mandatory, but in the pews there always sits a scattering of people from the streets. Afterward, they eat.

  On this warm July morning, when the breakfast is ready, we circle in the fellowship hall for a prayer. Outside, people wait at the brick edge of the parking lot. On the tables behind me sit large plastic serving trays of eggs, grits, home fries, sausage, fruit salad, four different baked goods, cream cheese, and squeeze bottles of jelly and syrup. On the rolling rack, loaves of bread have been wrapped for people to take with them when they leave.

  “We got a lot of people here,” G.W. begins in his baritone. “As I always say, it ain’t hard to start, it’s hard to finish. If people wipe the tables, sweep the floor, you know, carry the coffee back and whatever, we would be out of here in a shake of a lamb’s tail. That’s it,” he says. “I’ve been criticized for talking too long.” Everyone laughs.

  Pastor Tom Snapp of the Lutheran church takes over. “We thank you, heavenly Father, for bringing us here this morning. We thank you for being able to cook and serve. We thank you for the money you provided for us to buy the groceries. We thank you, Lord, for everything that’s so gracious that you give us. Help us to be humble. Help us to serve those who are hungry, that they may, through the food we serve, find the joy and grace of your love. In this we pray, in Jesus’s name. Amen.”

  “Amen,” we echo.

  In 2015, the state of Florida was home to an estimated 35,900 homeless people3 according to the annual point-in-time count conducted by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). On a single night in the last week of January, volunteers in each county across the country count the numbers of sheltered and unsheltered homeless people living there. Counties report their findings to HUD, broken out into categories of race, age, gender, familial status, and disability. In 2015, Florida had the third-highest number of homeless people in the country, behind New York and California. It had the second-highest number of unsheltered homeless.4 It had the highest number of homeless veterans.5 That year, Pinellas County, which sits on a peninsula near Tampa on the west coast of Florida, was home to 6,853 homeless people;6 40 percent of them were children.

  G.W. is a member of the Pinellas County Homeless Leadership Board,7 which is responsible for distributing Continuum of Care money from HUD each year into programs for permanent or transitional housing, supportive services for unhoused individuals, shelter data infrastructure, and homelessness prevention programs. Other members of the board include local elected officials, county sheriff Bob Gualtieri, members of the Juvenile Welfare Board, public service experts, members of local faith-based service providers, and one homeless or formerly homeless individual. Currently this is G.W.

  I first saw G.W. in a 2006 documentary called Easy Street, released by St. Petersburg–based production duo Wideyed Films. The film documents one year in the lives of five people experiencing homelessness in St. Petersburg, the largest city in Pinellas County, which had a reputation for being “a great place to be homeless”—with mild winters and abundant help agencies and free meal programs. The subjects include Patrick, an alcoholic; Peg, a victim of domestic violence; Karl, a bipolar teenager; Jaime, a widow who’s evicted along with her two children; and G.W.

  “My name is G.W. I’m forty-nine,” comes his voice over a black screen. “I’ve been on the streets on and off since I was fourteen.”

  The scene opens onto a busy four-way intersection on a sunny day. G.W. stands on the median in a fluorescent yellow St. Petersburg Times T-shirt. He holds aloft a copy of the newspaper from the stack at his feet.

  “I’m still selling papers. I’m doing it every second,” he says. “But it’s not gonna get you anywhere.”

  We cut to a shot of G.W. in Williams Park. He wears a long-sleeved black shirt with a skeleton screen print. He sits on a bench with his arm slung over the back.

  “A human being can get used to anything,” he says. “My friend asked me—he’s a religious guy—and he says, ‘What does Judgment Day mean to you?’ And I thought for a minute and I said, ‘To me, Judgment Day would be me standing before God, and God telling me that, “I gave you a certain amount of intellect. I gave you writing ability, communication ability; I gave you cooking ability; I gave you the ability to get along with people; I gave you this very deep voice—and you haven’t used any of it.”’ To me, hell is squandering my abilities.”

  He was seventeen and living in New York City when he and his friends robbed a drug dealer and the dealer’s girlfriend was shot. She reached for G.W.’s gun, which neither knew was loaded. G.W. was convicted of manslaughter and subsequently spent five years in prison.

  “A conviction of manslaughter stays with you for the rest of your life,” he says, looking out over the park. “The good thing was I got a scholarship to Syracuse University.
”

  At Syracuse, G.W. majored in philosophy and English, with a minor in religion. He wanted to be a lawyer or a teacher. “But it just couldn’t be,” he says. Everywhere he went—California, Washington—once they saw his record, they never called him back. “The one mistake has been that five minutes when I was seventeen years old,” he says. “My life has not been the same. Well, it has been the same—it’s been shitty.”

  G.W. has been arrested more times than he can count. He’s been in LA County jail. Orleans Parish prison. Rikers Island, when he was a kid. Every county jail in Buffalo. Most of the time, it was simply for being homeless. “I wrote about it in my book,” he said.8

  His autobiographical novel is called “Things That Break.” It tells the story of a formerly homeless minister, also named G.W., who presides over the citizens of Williams Park, and his entanglement with a particular homeless family called the Coyles. It opens with a prologue that details a fictionalized account of G.W.’s last arrest, for urinating in the middle of the night behind a Dumpster near where he’d been sleeping. He had a repeat work ticket for a day-labor gig the next day, which he’d hoped to turn into something steady. “At the end of the week,” he writes, “I’d be able to get a room for seventy-five dollars. Then bye, bye streets. If I got the steady.” Because of his arrest, he couldn’t get to work the next day. “Bye, bye job, I thought. Just like that.”

  After “Things That Break,” he plans to write two essay collections and finish a mystery novel he began the first time he went to prison, over forty years ago. “I’m on the bottom, but I’m an intellectual,” he says. “Most of the people on the bottom aren’t intellectuals.”9

  G.W. has always been a writer. He began writing during his first incarceration: short stories, essays, and a few attempted novels. When I met G.W. in 2009, he was putting together the second issue of The Homeless Image—a street paper by and for local homeless, to be sold by the homeless population to the general public. Then, in 2010, the City of St. Petersburg passed an ordinance banning the roadside sale of newspapers,10 and The Homeless Image folded.

  “I’m a better writer than Richard Wright and James Baldwin,” he says, adding that James Baldwin had the “advantage” of being black and gay. “Baldwin had angst.” He laughs. “He didn’t mince words.”

  In November 2015, G.W. was scheduled to present a paper in Geneva, Switzerland. The report, called Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading, was published by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, where G.W. sits on the board of directors. It concerns the criminalization of homelessness in the United States. He wasn’t there to present it. Instead, G.W. spent a night in Los Angeles County jail11 after turning himself in for a twenty-seven-year-old warrant for drug possession. The State Department had denied him a passport after the warrant came up in his background check—which is how he first learned of it. When he went down to take care of the warrant, he expected the statute of limitations to have long-since expired. But when he stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, he was approached by three officers. They booked him.

  Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading was published in 2013 based on research carried out by Yale Law School and Law Center staff. It outlines numerous violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention Against Torture12 carried out against persons experiencing homelessness by the US government at both state and local levels. It cites, among other things, lack of shelter space13 and available services for families in crisis;14 lack of affordable housing;15 the disproportionate representation of nonwhite and disabled people within the US housing-unstable population;16 and local ordinances, such as those against panhandling and sleeping outside, which target unhoused people.17 These violations specifically affect homeless people, criminalizing them for being homeless or for performing activities associated with homelessness. A Law Center study published in 2014, called No Safe Place, showed that these sorts of criminalizing ordinances had been sharply on the rise since 2009.18

  Though this topic has been circulating through the national conversation since 1999,19 it has gained traction in recent years. Many cities nationwide have lifted ordinances against panhandling, either voluntarily or by federal court order, citing the First Amendment right to free speech.20 In 2015, the Department of Justice filed a brief discouraging law enforcement from punishing people for sleeping outside if there is nowhere else to go, citing the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment. They declared that “needlessly pushing homeless individuals into the criminal justice system does nothing to break the cycle of poverty or prevent homelessness in the future,”21 and doing so “further burdens . . . scarce judicial and correctional resources.” Soon after, President Obama incentivized homelessness-prevention institutions and outreach programs by making it more difficult for municipalities to obtain HUD money if such programs aren’t in place,22 or if they aren’t moving to reduce laws criminalizing homelessness.23

  Instead of lifting ordinances targeting homeless individuals, some localities have put money into jail-diversion programs or shelters such as Pinellas County’s Safe Harbor, which is managed by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and stands on the campus of the Pinellas County jail in a former low-security annex.

  Safe Harbor opened in 2011 in response to a rise in the homeless population and overcrowding in the Pinellas County jail, where many of them were ending up.24 Clashes between the homeless community and local law enforcement had reached a fever pitch in recent years, especially in St. Petersburg: In 2007, just days after two homeless residents were found murdered, St. Petersburg law enforcement raided two camps, or “tent cities,” seizing property and slashing the residents’ living spaces with box cutters.25

  That year, Pinellas-Pasco public defender Bob Dillinger announced he would no longer represent homeless people arrested for violating municipal ordinances in St. Petersburg to protest what he called the “excessive arrests of homeless individuals.”26 Of the 879 people booked into the Pinellas County Jail on such ordinances over the last year, 676 came from St. Petersburg, and the vast majority of them were homeless. Without the public defender to represent such cases, the city would be forced to hire private attorneys or face a class-action lawsuit. Private attorneys would charge the city considerably more than the public defender’s flat fee of $50. “They’re trying to get the homeless out of the downtown area,” Dillinger told the St. Petersburg Times. “I would rather have them spend money on helping the homeless rather than arresting them.”27

  By 2009, the city had passed six new ordinances criminalizing homelessness,28 and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, along with the National Coalition for the Homeless, named St. Petersburg the second meanest city in the country29 for homeless people. Soon after, advocates filed a class action complaint against the city on behalf of local homeless individuals “who were routinely penalized for using public space to perform basic bodily functions when they had nowhere else to go,”30 among other measures.

  Desperate for a solution, in 2010 the City of St. Petersburg hired Robert Marbut to advise them. Marbut is a self-proclaimed, self-taught “homeless expert”—a Texas community college professor turned independent consultant peddling his Seven Guiding Principles for Transformation method of solving homelessness. Marbut’s principles, which he calls his “Velvet Hammer,”31 cast community residents as codependent enablers to loved ones addicted to homelessness, with phrases like “Free food handouts and cash from panhandling . . . perpetuates and increases homelessness through enablement”32 and “The mission should no longer be to ‘serve’ the homeless community.”33

  Cities hire Marbut to “research” their “homeless problem” and present his findings to the city council with recommendations for solution. Inevitably, he recommends building a one-stop-shop, come-as-you-are, twenty-four-hour emergency shelter like Safe Harbor—or what he calls a “transformational housing portal,” typically run by the sheriff’s department—and sweeping all of the are
a’s unhoused people inside it. There, they find everything they need: housing assistance, medical care, drug rehabilitation—Safe Harbor even has Wi-Fi. While construction is underway, Marbut continues to get paid.

  Safe Harbor is a jail-diversion program initially designed for those released from the county jail with nowhere to go and for those who were cycling through the system on municipal ordinances targeting homelessness.34 I visit the facility in July 2015. “Homeless get arrested, homeless go to jail, homeless get out of jail, then come back, and do the same thing over and over again,” says the deputy leading me on a tour, who asks not to be named. They get arrested for trespassing and are hit with a fine or a notice to appear, which they inevitably don’t fulfill. Next time a cop sees them, it’s an automatic trip to jail. It’s a burden on the taxpayers and a burden on the sheriff’s office, he says. The services that go on inside a jail are expensive. So are the public defender, who will need to defend these people, and the state attorney, who will prosecute them. Meanwhile, none of those expenses help prevent the alleged crime. The idea is to take these people to Safe Harbor rather than to jail. It costs $13 a day to keep a person in the shelter—compared with $125 a day for the jail.35 Big savings for the sheriff.

  My tour of Safe Harbor begins at the metal detector set up at the corner of the outdoor pod. Originally designed to hold 250 people, Safe Harbor now holds a daily average of 450,36 separated by gender into five housing areas, or pods. Four of the pods are inside, and one is outside. The outdoor pod is a slab of concrete sectioned off with a chain-link fence, two metal tents overhead, and a set of porta-potties. It’s intended for those who behave badly or show up inebriated, though it’s not unusual for people to spend the night here while waiting to get inside. As many as a hundred people have slept out here on a single night—and it rains a lot in Florida. The deputy, whom I’ll call Jake, is warm and loquacious. He later describes himself as a “big softie.” He explains that, while the shelter was originally intended to employ a large staff of caseworkers, the funding has since fallen away and they now employ only four, with two more employed by WestCare, a local mental health service organization.