Impacts of Florida’s camping ban
Central Florida Public Media is one of more than 10 news outlets across our region working together over the next six months to examine the impact of Florida’s camping ban law.
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Once completed, the program will offer 60 beds for guests who experience unsheltered homelessness across the county, on a reservation basis. -
Critics say a new executive order makes it easier to arrest and institutionalize unhoused people. -
The law bans unauthorized camping or sleeping on public property. Its effectiveness is unclear, and depends on who you ask. -
Experts believe Florida’s camping ban is having an affect on the number of people experiencing homelessness in the region. -
Tim McKinney has been working with the “forgotten community” of Bithlo, asking for homeless shelters, especially now with Florida’s camping ban. -
Several 2025 Point-In-Time Counts hinted to legal and social pressures, making it harder to track the unhoused.
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A regional reporting collaborative aims to track the impact of Florida’s tough homelessness law. -
Overall, homelessness case numbers are on par with last year for Orange, Seminole, and Osceola counties. Nearly half of them are children and seniors. -
The project will repurpose two Greyhound-style buses as shelters, providing nearly 40 overnight beds for the unhoused in the Downtown Orlando area. -
Area residents who stood against the shelter said they were relieved by the news but want to see the city work on “actual solutions” to homelessness. -
The Downtown Orlando Community Redevelopment Agency board approved the bus shelters on Wednesday, in need of immediate shelters. -
Activists said incidents will continue until unhoused people in east Orlando get shelter or other alternatives. The county said deputies have yet to arrest anyone for public camping.
Editors Note:
Earlier this month, a provision went into effect allowing Floridians to sue counties failing to enforce a new state law prohibiting people from camping or sleeping on public property.
Under HB 1365, municipalities can designate specific areas for public sleeping as long as those areas are certified by the Florida Department of Children and Families.
If you’ve driven around Central Florida, from Orange County to Osceola and Seminole counties and beyond, you know that the problem of homelessness is real. In fact, numbers just released this week for the 2024 Point In Time Count found 2,776 people without permanent housing in those three counties alone. It’s a more than 20% increase that includes people living in emergency and transitional housing as well as their vehicles and on the streets.
Sometimes, there are stories so big and so important that we wish we had more capacity, more people power, more brain power to cover those issues in all their nuance and complexity.
This is one of those issues.
That’s why over the next six months the news team here at Central Florida Public Media will be collaborating with at least nine other news outlets, across the region to cover the impacts of this public sleeping ban and what’s still to come as the state legislature begins a new session.
While collaboration is not new for us, this partnership is. It includes news organizations big and small from newspapers to television and of course public media outlets. Our goal is simple, produce impactful journalism for the betterment of our respective audiences. As far as what this collaborative effort means for our Central Florida Public Media Audience, you’ll see names on our website and even on air from time to time from reporters from other news outlets. And if we get this right, which we totally intend on doing, you will be far more informed than you ever would have been with just our reporting alone.
While we are starting with the sleeping ban, we are working to make this just the first of many deep dive collaborative journalism efforts to come all focused on helping you understand an act in whatever way you see fit on critical issues here in Central Florida.
Participating News Organizations:
