Impacts of Florida’s camping ban

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.