“We have to begin to act”: Gainesville City Commission votes to send letter to SBAC requesting collaboration on family homelessness
BY JENNIFER CABRERA
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – In response to requests made during General Public Comment today, Gainesville City Commissioners voted to send the School Board a letter similar to the County Commission’s letter, asking for collaboration on family homelessness.
During General Public Comment, Jacob Torner, President of the Task Force For Ending Homelessness, said he came to “bring awareness to the importance of working collaboratively to keep families and children off our streets.” Citing a recent report stating that 930 students in Alachua County leave the classroom each day without a stable place to call home, Torner said, “We must act now.” Referring to the letter from Alachua County Commission Chair Ken Cornell to School Board of Alachua County Chair Thomas Vu, asking the school district to review their underutilized and vacant facilities and meet with other local entities to work collaboratively on family homelessness, Torner said, “Let me be very clear: This is not about assigning responsibility; it’s about sharing it. No single agency, government, or entity can solve family homelessness alone, but together, we can align our resources, facilities, and leadership to create practical solutions.”
Torner said recent remarks from School Board members were “reprehensible, specifically because I have not heard a single person request that schools become public homeless shelters, as some board members falsely suggested… The request made to the district by the Board of County Commissioners was straightforward and very reasonable: come to the table and be part of the solution, supporting your students.” He asked the City of Gainesville to be part of the effort and to also review their own facilities.
Mayor Harvey Ward immediately said he was interested in taking action on the issue, and he adjusted the agenda to move Member Comment to the spot immediately after General Public Comment.
Leigh Scott, Director of Community Engagement at Family Promise, said Family Promise currently has 47 families in stable housing, “but we’re far from where we need to be.” He said the data point of 930 homeless students is low, suggesting that it’s closer to 2,000 “when you talk about folks on the verge or that don’t meet the HUD definition of homelessness; this is folks sleeping in hotels, in unstable situations, couch surfing, the folks that escape our data… I fear we’re just on the tip of the iceberg for how bad it’s about to be.”
Scott said, “I find it really sad that we have all the money and resources to detain people, but not to prevent the problem in the first place. We have 1300 beds at the jail, 150 at the individual shelter, but zero family shelter beds in Gainesville… I find the recent remarks by one School Board Member troubling, because as long as we keep othering people, then it makes it incredibly difficult to do our job. When we care more about likes in the Alachua Chronicle comment section than we do the children we’re serving, then we’re a far leap from where we need to be.”
Stephen Foster Elementary will close at the end of this school year
Ward said he has had conversations with Family Promise and other organizations, along with individual meetings with County Commissioners and School Board Members, regarding the possible use of Stephen Foster Elementary (which will be closed after this school year) as a family resource center: “It occurred to me that it might be an opportunity to have a literacy program, maybe some medical programs, as well as some transitional opportunities for homeless families… Empty elementary classrooms often have plumbing.”
Ward recalled Family Promise’s previous model of asking churches to host a few families for a week at a time, on a rotating schedule; that model was ended during COVID. He pointed out that Stephen Foster Elementary “is on bus routes; it’s near shopping; you can, in many cases, get to work from temporary housing at that address.”
Ward said he has “zero interest in trying to force the School Board to do anything with their property. I am interested in knowing, as Mayor, what their plan for that property is and how that affects our community… I am not trying to start a fight… The truth is, whether Stephen Foster is the right place or not, we as a community have done a much better job over the last 10 to 15 years of housing houseless individuals and sheltering houseless individuals. It’s not perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than it was when there were large tent cities near downtown and 100 people… sleeping on Bo Diddley Plaza.”
However, Ward said, “We have continued to not see family homelessness, to pretend that there aren’t folks sleeping in their cars, because families sleeping in their cars and families in tents, for very specific reasons, are hard to see. They’re not standing on the street corner asking for money. They’re not the picture that pops up in all our minds when we use the word ‘homeless,’ but they are among the most vulnerable folks in our community. We know that there are a minimum of 900 to 1,000 children in our county who don’t have a stable place to sleep tonight. That can no longer be acceptable, in my opinion.”
Ward apologized for not making family homelessness a priority when he was first elected, nine years ago, “but it is in front of us now, and I’m saying this so that we cannot ignore it… It requires every institution in our community joining hands and doing this work together, whether we have a statutory responsibility or not.” He offered to send a letter to the School Board making the same points Cornell made.
Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut said she would like him to send the letter and get various local organizations “to come join us at the table.”
Motion
Chestnut made a motion to “instruct the Mayor to send a letter to the County Commission and School Board, enlisting their support in using Stephen Foster Elementary School as a family resource center site.” Ward suggested, “With the same items that were in the letter from Chair Cornell.” There were multiple seconds.
The motion was later rewritten to, “Direct the Mayor to send a letter to the Alachua Board of County Commissioners and the Alachua County School Board, with the same points made in the County letter.”
Commissioner Casey Willits said he would support the motion to start conversations around solutions, “and I agree that some of the rhetoric can be unhelpful.” He said he hoped the School Board would work with the City “the same way, if the School Board wants to come to us and ask for, I don’t know, better access to rebuild a stadium, we work with them.”
Commissioner Ed Book suggested gathering “nonprofit partners… because that’s long-term progress and long-term efforts by people who will be very passionate about helping.”
Book said the City and County are “putting their money where their mouth is. This is a good thing — millions of dollars, not thousands, not hundreds, through the housing programs, the supportive services, GRACE Marketplace… We’re doing more than almost anyone in the entire region that I’m aware of.” He asked the Interim City Manager to find out what the surrounding counties are doing because “we want to support everything we can, but we also don’t want to bring people in and dilute the impact for the people that are in Alachua County.”
Ward said the City may not be able to allocate additional funds to homeless family services, given their budget constraints, but they could be a “convening authority.”
Ward added, “I also want to say to folks who are working primarily, if not exclusively, on individual homelessness: I am not interested in cutting the aid that we provide for individual homelessness. That will have repercussions… But we’re at a point where something must be accomplished. When we’re looking at [nearly] 1,000 children without access to good housing in this community, to know where they’re gonna sleep tonight, we have to begin to act.”
After establishing that there was no public comment, Ward said, “I’m not looking to think for the School Board, but the School Board needs to be a part of the discussion. Every institution in our community needs to be a part of the discussion, or we will continue to be disappointed. That’s just the reality of it.”
The motion passed 4-0, with Commissioners Desmon Duncan-Walker, Bryan Eastman, and James Ingle absent.
Alachua County Commission Chair Cornell also responded to the School Board’s comments today in an opinion piece, which can be found at this link.
20 years ago the City of Gainesville had a 10 year program to end homelessness. The City failed and the homeless population increased. Now they want to ship the homeless to schools.
We must act now they say, but none said they would house a homeless family in their own home.
I paid school board tax for over 20 years. If the SBAC turns our schools into a homeless shelter, I want to see a serious reduction in SBAC taxes! I paid for the education of children not a homeless hotel.
The City of Gainesville Commission can keep your homeless in your City boundary.
“We MUST act now!” Typical liberal nonsense. We have identified the problem and now we have to do SOMETHING! Unfortunately something from a Leftest usual turns into a real $hit show for the rest of us logically grounded common sense conservatives.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Winston Churchill
Idea – lower property taxes and utility rates to make renting or owning a home more affordable!
Homelessness is not a government issue. Sorry. If people want to help they should. Donate, give, help, volunteer, go to work for a not for profit but, this won’t help.
Did. You. Fix. Fix. The roads?
Amen. Second this. Third this. Our Government refuses to address our biggest concern. But they’ll throw our tax money at a problem they have failed to solve and won’t ever solve, and have no intention of solving. Fix. Our. Roads. Nothing else, until you fix our roads. I, for one, will vote against EVERY initiative, every program, every idea our local government attempts until they: FIX. OUR. ROADS.
“Torner said recent remarks from Schoo| Board members were “reprehensible, specifically because I have not heard a single person request that schools become public homeless shelters, as some board members falsely suggested…”
Really? Let me remind you of Mayor Ward’s comments in late March. From the Mainstreet Daily News:
“Ward said the next conversation is addressing families who are homeless and living in cars or moving from couch to couch- a more visible form than panhandlers or people sleeping on sidewalks.
“Ward said he’d like to see if stakeholders could turn empty buildings, especially schools, into family centers with education and health assistance and perhaps short- term housing. He said it’s a conversation worth having. And the school district will end up with some unused buildings after its vote to shutter some schools”
It sure sounds like Ward is describing a family homeless shelter to me. It’s “reprehensible” that you attacked Chair Vu without checking your facts
They want to use the shelters to groom political activists. It’s not good enough our courts groom lifetime criminals, that was the template.
ACLUSPLCDNC 🤡💩👿👹👺
A closed school building is no longer a school. It’s just an empty building that can be repurposed into anything, including a temporary residence for unhoused families.
But at who’s expense? The taxpayer again. Plus it can’t fall under Federal Homeless Act. That states only Federal surplus property is allowed.
Since you don’t mind spending taxpayers money to house these people, why don’t you put your money where your mouth is? Why don’t you invite one of these homeless families to your house proved to us that you truly care take care of them for a few weeks post some pictures.
Yeah, we got homelessness. Why?…..Maybe people worldwide are investing their money in US real estate, because it is safe (no war here). Maybe people fleeing New York and California are buying vacation homes. Maybe all that money drives the price of a modest home out of reach…However, it is not right to use taxpayer’s money for this.
When your policy is welcoming illegals, what do you expect? Wages stay down while rents go up … but don’t expect Dems to understand logic 💩🤡
It’s like clockwork. All of this rhetoric reminds me that it’s an election year.
It’s like crack for the partisans.
I don’t recall Lard-arsed Harvey ‘Two Face’ Ward offering any room in his big house for a homeless person.
He needs to get off his soapbox and put his money where his disproportionately loud mouth is.
More big talk from another hypocrite — always trying to get someone else to pay for their virtue.
Notice something? I took an earlier comment about Lil Kenny and replaced it with Ward’s name. Both continue to show their true colors and hypocrisy. If you think about it, you could replace any sitting commissioner’s name and it would be equally applicable.
liberal = performing good works with other people’s money.
Full court press on homelessness. With all the big brains in the County Commission, the City Commission, and the school board they ought to be able to talk about it for easily another 10-12 years.
I mean, as soon as they’re done thinking about talking about it. Then they have to begin talking about it. So give them another year or two to really get talking
Gainesville has become a mecca for the homeless all over the southeast. In my experience there are those that do need homeless services, families that become homeless due to a cascading series of negatives, families that have been burned out etc, Many of the homeless are ex convicts and the mentally ill. We (the county and city) spend enormous amounts of money on fire, police and ambulances going to Grace marketplace. In this era of tax worries and ever increasing spending by politicians I need to ask? Is this money well spent?
Know is the time to act. All Commissioners should donate their salary to end “Homelessness”.
The closed school facilities need to be repurposed and hopefully not torn down. The community needs to be involved.
For near homeless families with children in school, can there be emergency anti-eviction response funds for families so that children can remain in their school for the year. Much less costly than moving them about in government maintained facilities.
In my opinion all school board members care deeply for the students, and to say otherwise is not false. Pulling at heart strings with sad stories doesn’t invalidate the need in making prudent and fiscally responsible decisions about community property by all parties involved.
I’m all for providing needed assistance to actual homeless children/families in our area. The problem is that our local govt has built a side industry by prioritizing and promoting the unnecessary non-local/transient homeless. Our county and city are known nationwide as a haven to both illegal immigrants and transient homeless.
If these politicians weren’t playing politics they would have first thrown every available resource at our truly homeless children/families. Instead they do not mention anything about it for decades. They play the national party script to a T.
Seems to me that the city and county should change their loving and promoting attitude towards the transient homeless and violent homeless while simultaneously ramping up the assistance for local homeless families and children.
They worrying about the homelessness but close the reichert house down saying the city didn’t have the funds now one of they’re buddies reopen it
Just ten years after the city commission decided to end homelessness, Mayor Ward says; “We have to begin to act”.
Here’s my suggestion;
Within the next 30 days have every NGO and city and county departments specifically tasked with the issues of homelessness in Alachua county, submit complete financial and operational verifiable data to the Alachua County Commission in PDF format to include complete IRS required filings for the past 5 years and post it for the citizens of Alachua county on line. Anyone wishing to be involved in the requested meetings “60 days” out, MUST submit these documents OR be excluded from the conversation.
The issue is real. The response is a good start. BUT, you must first have real data to find out where you are first. As a ships Navigator for many years I can attest to the need to know where you are BEFORE you chart a course for where you want to go.
That said, You can already envision the turf war and endless discussions if you have any cognition of the way Alachua county governments have operated in the past.
I would also like to point out that documents that Mr. Cornell has pointed to do not address homelessness, accept in passing, it is about education.
Key Educational Rights
The Act guarantees several critical rights for homeless students:
Immediate Enrollment: Students can enroll in school without typical documentation such as proof of residency, immunization records, or prior school records
naehcy.org
School Stability: Students have the right to attend their school of origin, even if they move to a different district, with transportation provided at no cost
Wikipedia
Wikipedia
.
Access to Services: Homeless students must receive the same free, appropriate public education as other students, including access to preschool programs and support services
ocde.us
ocde.us
.
Supportive Services: Schools must provide assistance to address barriers to learning, including tutoring, counseling, and other academic supports
naehcy.org
naehcy.org
The total legislation can be viewed here;
https://nche.ed.gov/legislation/every-student-succeeds-act/
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a homeless family on the streets of Gainesville. It’s always the homeless drug addicts, alcoholics and mentally ill.
My family was homeless, we were fortunate to have had Saint Francis House! However now the doors are closed for other families. And as for never seeing them on the streets it is because they try to stay out of the public eye for the sake of the kids not going to the system that has failed so many. They hide, they get their kids to school and do what they can to get by day by day to include jobs. Many of those families are homeless due to one minor emergency to some that became a major one for them.
the schools are bad enugh now and now u want hoomeless to trash them
These soft hearted do gooders never let a ‘crisis’ go to waste do they? Every ’cause of the hour’ costs taxpayers. A bunch of Robin hood commissioners take from the rich and piss it away to the poor. Don’t they know the more resources they direct to the homeless encourages more of them to show up on our doorstep expecting handouts and burdening ems, fire, police, the ER, etc????
Gainesville City Commission is panicking because they need money. Now that the GRU slush fund has been snatched out of their greedy little hands and “climate change” isn’t popular anymore, they are using “the homeless problem” as their vehicle for laundering taxpayer money into campaign donations, favors for donors / family members, and straight up pocketing cash.
Gainesville has poured millions of dollars into the black hole that is “the homeless problem” and yet it gets worse and worse every year…which of course means we have to spend more tax dollars…which makes the problem get even worse, and so on.
The FBI needs to investigate Mayor Ward’s finances, pronto.
How much does Gainesville’s “Climate Czar” make now? $125k/year?? I have not heard a peep from her since she was hired at $85K/year a while ago.
We have a climate czar?!?! Thank GOD! I was so concerned the sea-level rise and a 2-degree temperature change (in either direction) would harm my family. What a great relief! I was sleepless last night concerned that our county wasn’t leading our nation’s response to global warming, wait… climate change, wait… what’s it call these days?
Someone call the state DOGE and tell them they are trying to divert our school taxes to go to stopping homelessness…the state constitution says “children deserve a free education”…that does not include housing for vagrants!
“Nurturing” the homelessness crises (as in continuing the grift). There. Fixed it for you.
“We have to act,…”.
Then ACT: “homelessness” did NOT start yesterday, in Gainesville, in Alachua County, or anywhere else in the USA.
Without a clear understanding of HOW and WHY anyone, in the most advanced and wealthiest country on the planet, could be “homeless”, no resolution will be attained.
“Ward said the City may not be able to allocate additional funds to homeless family services, given their budget constraints,…”
Budget constraints:
– $590,000 purchase of 75 “smart” trash/recycling compactors in 2025.
– outdoor renovation project at Gainesville City Hall — commonly called the “City Hall Plaza Refresh Project” — costing about $1.8 million in total construction funding
– $45,000 forgivable loan for Heartwood Soundstage in April 2026.
– $40,000 allocation for HVAC repairs at Cotton Club Museum approved by the Gainesville City Commission in 2026
– City of Gainesville’s permanent downtown “Streatery” project is currently budgeted at approximately $4.5 million for construction and infrastructure work.
Sorry, kids no money for you.
Maybe these 1,000+ un-sheltered children can eat out of one of those $7,867 trash cans – sleep on the refreshed City Hall Plaza – get help from Heartwood Soundstage – get relief from the heat at the Cotton Club Museum – panhandle for food and money at the revitalized “Streatery”.
Wish you all would have thought about that before giving grace so much money. Y’all were warned that there were financial issues and families needing shelter! SHAME ON ALL OF YOU CITY AND COUNTY!
Sell the buildings and put that money into the ROADS or to reduce our out of control budget. Simple!