A pizza box might mean another item for the recycling bin to some people. But for a homeless person, it could carry an entirely different significance.
When an encampment sweep in 2024 took everything one woman owned, including her art supplies, she turned a pizza box into her canvas.
“These policies don’t just displace people,” said Kathryn Greenberg, former executive director and current board member of Project Downtown Gainesville (PDG), recalling the woman’s situation, “they also take away their ability to express themselves outside of their circumstances.”
Gainesville has long been known for its significant homeless population. Patterns of enforcement followed by orders to back off have occurred since the early 2000s. When Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1365 in 2024, a statewide law prohibiting camping or sleeping on public property, Gainesville was required to adopt the ordinance or face legal consequences. The Gainesville City Commission passed the encampment ban, with some commissioners sharing their reluctance.
Years of Planning and Struggling
The city has been struggling to solve this issue of homelessness for years. In 2005, a 10-year plan was introduced to end homelessness. As part of this plan, GRACE Marketplace opened in 2014 as one of Gainesville’s main shelters, offering services for unhoused residents. For years, it operated alongside Dignity Village, the nearby encampment that was active until its closure in 2020.
But the struggle continued as the cost of rent increased. The recent closing of St. Francis House left fewer places for families experiencing homelessness to go. Nearly two years after the encampment ban, its effects are still felt in different ways.
The ban led to an immediate increase in demand, said GRACE Marketplace CEO Darius Williams.
“We saw an influx of individuals who needed GRACE’s services,” he explained, “because they didn’t want to get in trouble with the law.”
GRACE has expanded beds, increased staffing and adjusted services to meet higher demand. Williams has supported the ban, noting that encampments can “get out of control” and require involvement from law enforcement and fire rescue. He emphasized that the city paired the ban with significant funding, including more than $2 million annually for GRACE and a $500,000 renovation of the women’s dorm.
“It would have been tough if they put that ordinance in place and had no funding,” Williams said. “But they did both.”
Different Outcome for Some
However, not every service in town experienced the same outcome. While GRACE saw an influx, the ban made it harder for unhoused residents to access their weekend meal services at City Hall, Greenberg said.
“At the beginning of the ban, we saw fewer people coming to our services,” Greenberg said. “A lot of the sweeps were happening downtown, which is exactly where we serve. People were scared to settle down anywhere because they didn’t know when the next sweep would happen.”
Project Downtown Gainesville also witnessed an increase in police and security presence at City Hall, and there were several interactions Greenberg described as tense or disruptive.
City Hall later removed the public tables the group relied on for their weekend food distributions, forcing volunteers to serve meals out of cars and parking lots until they purchased foldable tables.
As services like GRACE Marketplace and PDG continue to work to serve these victims of homelessness, it raises the question of why exactly this is such a prevalent issue in Gainesville.
At the root of all homelessness is a lack of affordable housing, said Anne Ray of the University of Florida’s Schimberg Center for Housing Studies. She said when housing becomes more expensive, homelessness rises.
As manager of the center’s Florida Housing Data Clearinghouse, she helps to produce a rental market study every three years. And while UF and the economic activity it brings to the city can be good for the city, it could also help explain why housing shortages in Gainesville are so prevalent.
“When you have economic activity in a college town,” Ray said, “that’s going to drive housing needs and costs higher.”
Alongside the presence of a university campus, the city also faces the repercussions of a national surge in housing costs that occurred around 2020. While the surge has since leveled out and drawn back some, Ray said, it is still too high for many people to afford.
Working With Resources at Hand
Despite the lack of affordable housing in Gainesville and surrounding Central Florida areas, Ray said Florida has the largest state housing trust fund and one of the strongest affordable housing production policies in the country.
“We have to use the tools that we have,” Ray said.
Jacob Torner, vice president of programs at TaskForce for Ending Homelessness, said the city of Gainesville is actually using its resources following the ban.
“They [city officials] have started to do more of their job of making sure that resources are available, that law enforcement is supported, that they're collaborating with the continuum of care in that effort,” Torner said.
Under the TaskForce for Ending Homelessness, Keys to Home prioritizes street outreach. Following the ban, Torner said they used it as an opportunity to double down on their efforts and surge street outreach to levels higher than ever before.
“The only thing that has shown to work is for someone to physically show up,” he said, “talk to the person, find out what their needs are, and get them the help they need.”
During this surge, Keys to Home focused on strategies such as training law enforcement and fire rescue officials on how to interact with the homeless when responding to reports of camping. Responding to the report is one thing, Torner said, but actually having a successful conversation and getting them the help they need is another. Rather than just telling them to move to a different corner, they were learning how to connect these individuals with Keys to Home’s centers of care.
Despite Alachua County having the highest homelessness population out of the seven counties overseen by the TaskForce for Ending Homelessness, the efforts made under the Keys to Home program have resulted in a significant drop in the county’s point-in-time count — the count of people experiencing homelessness in an area. This drop is most likely due to the fact that the street outreach methods used have focused on more than just initial contact and have extended to helping people stay in housing once they are in it.
“The last thing we would want,” Torner said, “is for someone to have been successful [in getting off the street], and then 3 or 6 or 12 months later, return back to the streets.”
While the TaskForce for Ending Homelessness will continue its efforts to end homelessness, collaborating with student housing units is the next big step. Housing prices are out of control, Torner said, and student housing complexes create a huge barrier for affordable housing. One solution to this problem, Torner said, is for these complexes to designate certain units to affordable housing for low-income families and individuals. While there would have to be guidelines on who could live in these units, if this were implemented in every complex, it would add a significant amount of affordable housing to the community, he said.
While homelessness is not an issue that can be solved overnight, the city of Gainesville will continue to work on it with the help of Torner and initiatives such as Keys to Home.
“I’m hopeful,” Torner said, “that we’ll continue to impact the homeless in the way that we have.”