In Williams Park: A Struggle for Survival

Although he looks it, Roy Jackson is not alone on his bench in the north end of Williams Park in downtown St. Petersburg. None of his homeless companions is sitting with him. But he has almost 50 friends looking up at him with rapt attention. He addresses the pigeons jockeying for scraps at his feet with kisses.

Startled by something, the birds fly off and other homeless people come to sit near Roy, a 50-something black man with sandals, a 5-o’clock shadow and a bald spot. This morning, with a few dozen, there are fewer homeless people than Roy’s pigeons, but from the sidewalk, they still look like a crowd. And indeed, despite the dogged efforts of city samaritans, they are.

St. Petersburg’s homeless community is growing and the resources it uses -- including its home base at Williams Park -- are not. Statistics illustrating the trend are almost as elusive as its causes, but St. Vincent de Paul, one of the shelters that feeds, bathes and houses the homeless, has seen a 20 percent rise in its services from last year at this time.

“The problem of homeless has definitely been growing in downtown St. Pete,” said Beth Eschenfelder, president of the Pinellas Homeless Coalition. Her group conducted a survey last year tallying 1,397 homeless people in St. Petersburg. The vast majority live downtown, with a plurality in Williams Park. But Fred Fearday, an official with the Boley Centers for Behavioral Health Care, cautioned that because of stigmas attached to homelessness, the survey was surely an undercount.

The swelling population is placing unknown -- and perhaps immeasurable -- strains on city services, downtown businesses, and the city’s overall quality of life. And although they have made progress addressing the problem, members of the city community are feeling increasingly stymied.

No one is quite sure why the homeless population is growing now, but speculation abounds among business owners and homeless advocates. Ron Gilbert, who owns Gilbert Jewelers on the southeast corner of the park, sees his drop in sales and the rise of the homeless as symptoms of the same economic malaise. Eric Rubin, director of the Tampa Bay Action Group, agrees.

“More and more poor, working people are being put out of work,” he said.

Some local business owners are less sympathetic. Barb Morlack, who works at Kaufman’s Jewelers on First Avenue North, called the problem “terrible for business.”

“It just gets worse every day,” she said. “It looks very poor for tourists coming down here.”

Fearday and Sophie Sampson, who runs St. Vincent de Paul, pointed to the recent closure of a mental hospital in Arcadia. Fearday, whose group treats the mentally ill and has 300 beds reserved for the homeless, said that there has been a dramatic uptake in the number of afflicted itinerants.

“The causes are complex,” he said. “People want to look for a ready answer -- this or that is the case. Poverty is overwhelmingly the cause, but severe mental illness leaves people with few resources. Some people just aren’t able to maintain housing on their own.”

He cited statistics showing that among America’s homeless, 53 percent have experienced mental illness in the last year, and 62 percent have experienced it in their lifetimes. Also, 83 percent cited a history of alcohol or drug abuse. Most have experienced physical or sexual trauma, sometimes both.

Sampson said that most people living in St. Vincent’s brand-new temporary shelter on 14th Street North were on medication, often for bipolar disorder, and when they felt stable enough to stop taking their pills, they “went off the deep end.” She frequently sends patients to St. Anthony’s Hospital across the street for treatment -- residents often get back on the wagon after finding housing -- or detox.

Sgt. Gary Robbins, who oversees the downtown area for St. Petersburg’s Police Department, had a different answer.

“We’ve gotten an influx here,” he said. “I won’t dispute that.”

But he called the hype a misperception based on the changing demographics of downtown. “There’s been a paradigm shift.” As the downtown area became more residential, with the addition of condominiums over the last 15 years, and with the 33 percent increase in traffic Baywalk has brought in the last three years, “People are arriving later and later at night,” Robbins said.

“It’s just that [the homeless] are more noticeable now that downtown is a destination… And development in the surrounding blocks has condensed [homelessness] into the area.”

He also suggested that St. Petersburg received the brunt of a Tampa clean-up drive immediately before Super Bowl XXXVII this year. He hinted that Tampa’s homeless had been brought to Williams Park, though he didn’t say by whom.

“It used to be that we knew every single person downtown. Now, the only ones we know are ones that we have [law enforcement] issues with. What a coinkydink that during Super Bowl time, we’re getting all these people we’ve never seen before,” he said.

Alan Rulifson of Green Bench Flowers on Fourth Street North blamed homelessness on the homeless.

“They wanna be homeless,” he said. “They don’t want to be helped.”

But Sampson said too many people buy into that misconception.

“You don’t judge people because, were it not for the grace of God, that could be you,” she said. “It just takes one situation -- a stroke, for example -- to change your whole life. I don’t think most of them want to be homeless. The mental patients, what can they do? They’re stuck. And they certainly don’t belong in jail. And they don’t have a family.

“They all have a story,” she said.

A 61-year-old woman in Williams Park this month illustrated just one such story.

“We are not the dregs of society,” she said, of coping with the reputation sown by the drunks and addicts. She did not want her name used for fear of reprisals, which, she said, sometimes come in the form of rape.

She spent her savings caring for a sick boyfriend and became homeless when she was fired, over what she said was burnt meatloaf, from her last job as a live-in caretaker. She carries odds and ends from her former life -- letters from an old boyfriend, a change of clothes, toiletries, citizenship papers -- in a shopping cart that she fears losing enough to decline offers of food, air conditioning or even showers.

“What am I supposed to do? Should I leave it outside for someone to steal?” she asked. “If I lose my cart, I might as well be dead.”

Still, Robbins said, homeless people “can be their own worst enemies.” Some, like the woman with the cart, won’t accept aid that requires her to abandon her cart, even momentarily. Others, like one whom Robbins called George, have been arrested more than 200 times. They get drunk and violate city ordinances on profanity, panhandling or trespassing but are inevitably released for time served within 20 hours.

Robbins is beginning to craft a strategy for boxing repeat offenders out of the opportunities for trouble of the kind that Williams Park provides. “If we could hit them with misdemeanors, we could enhance the penalties -- not put them in jail, because we don’t want to do that. If we can get probation, we can make the terms.”

He hopes to use probation to bar individual perpetrators from the city’s hot spots, effectively relegating them to treatment centers or shelters, although some shelters will not accept particular homeless men because of past abuses. For judges to gain that power, the City Council will have to classify some of the transgressions as misdemeanors rather than ordinance violations.

Most of them, though, are quiet people, he said. “You’d be surprised how many bachelor’s and master’s degrees.”

Other frustrated groups are trying different strategies to combat the growing homelessness. Mary Moore from the Bayshore Church of God in Christ in southern St. Petersburg brings sandwiches at lunchtime thrice weekly so that homeless community members don’t need to spend money on lunch. When she steps in the park with her crate of food and juice, a crowd forms immediately; the crate is empty within three minutes.

But the high concentration of homeless people in Williams Park is, in part, the fault of misguided philanthropists who bring food, according to Robbins. In 2000, Kathleen Ford, a former City Council member, and Steve Kersker, a local homeless advocate, created the Homeless Outreach Taskforce, which organized faith-based handouts around St. Vincent de Paul. That took the onus off of local business owners to clean up the ever-accumulating trash in the park and reduced the number of sidewalk defecations that local businesses were reporting. St. Vincent’s, 11 blocks away, has free toilets -- the facilities at Williams Park close at dusk and don’t reopen until dawn -- as well as a soup kitchen and a place for homeless people to shower.

Distributing food at Williams Park is not illegal, but it is highly discouraged.

“I’m seeing one-fifth of what was happening here before the task force,” Robbins said, which, presumably, explains why, of at least 1,400 homeless people citywide, only 25 were in the park watching Roy Jackson feed the birds.