Florida tent city offers hope to homeless

By Robert Green
ST. PETERSBURG, Florida (Reuters) - A Florida tent city for hundreds of homeless people lies at the end of a dead-end street, but residents say they have not given up hope of a better life despite the U.S. economic downturn.
The Pinellas Hope camp, 250 single-person tents in neat rows on land owned by the Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg in a wooded area north of the city, has room for about 270 and has been filled to capacity since it opened two years ago.
"I could open the gates and have over 500 people," said Sheila Lopez, the chief operating officer for Catholic Charities at the St. Petersburg diocese.
The camp has a food hall, bathrooms and showers, a laundry room and a few computers for residents to look for jobs and prepare resumes.
"This is a great place to be. It gives us a great opportunity," said Alex, a resident who declined to give his last name. "We have a safe place to live. It sure beats sleeping on the street."
The number of homeless people in the United States, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, is difficult to pin down, advocacy groups say, because most people are homeless for only a short period of time.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates about 675,000 people are homeless on any given night during a one-month period. Between 2.5 million and 3.5 million Americans experience homelessness for at least one night in a year.
The alliance said it expects more than 1 million people to become homeless as a result of the current recession.
THE END IS NOT NEAR
Tent cities have sprouted across the United States and advocates believe they could represent the leading edge of a wave of homelessness in the coming months as U.S. unemployment, nearing 10 percent, rises.
"I don't think we've begun to see the end of it. I think the challenges remain significant and they remain in front of us," said Ron Book, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, where calls to a homeless hotline have quadrupled in the last year.
Florida, where unemployment has soared as the recession put out of work thousands of people employed on construction sites during the housing boom, has nearly 50,000 homeless, according to the alliance. Nearly 6,500 of those are in the Tampa area.
Asked about the proliferation of tent cities at a news conference in March, U.S. President Barack Obama said it was "not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours."
He cited his jobs programs and spending on infrastructure as ways of combating the problem.
In some places, tent cities are discouraged. In Seattle, for example, authorities arrested and moved homeless people from a tent encampment -- called Nickelsville as a protest of Mayor Greg Nickels' policies -- on city land last fall. Some of those people have recently returned. Continued...
Source: Reuters