North Tampa's revival is slow, but that's OK

By JOE HENDERSON | The Tampa Tribune
Published: November 29, 2012
   

                   

Just a few hours after Mayor Bob Buckhorn's announcement Tuesday of a large-scale plan for the transformation of downtown Tampa, I was riding with City Councilwoman Lisa Montelione in a part of the city that could use a little love.

While Buckhorn touted a rebuilt urban core with new high-rises, a completed Riverwalk, festivals and upscale places to live, Montelione couldn't wait to show me the new drainage project not far from the University of South Florida. It will help ease chronic flooding problems in the area.

As we drove over streets badly in need of repaving, past several abandoned homes with weed-choked yards, she would occasionally point at daisies popping up through the blight.

"See there?" she said, pointing at a well-kept house. "That looks nice. And that one over there looks nice, too."

* * * * *

It has to start somewhere, and in areas like Terrace Park and the neighborhoods around Busch Gardens it might mean something as basic as flood control and streets that don't wreck your car's suspension."Having infrastructure in place for any community is the foundation of success," she said. "If the streets flood, the roads deteriorate. If the roads deteriorate, housing values fall. If housing values fall, people move out and abandon the area."

Besides the basic neighborhood necessities of better streets, parks, sidewalks, streetlights and flood control, there has to be a long-range plan to lift the area. Leaders have been talking about that for a while, including the creation of high-tech jobs around USF.

From 6 to 8 tonight, Montelione and Buckhorn will hold an open house at the Gwazi Pavilion at Busch Gardens to talk about those plans. The planning commission has been talking with neighborhood residents and business leaders about what they want. Tonight, they'll reveal the results of those surveys.

* * * * *

There is no quick fix, though. That much became clear as we continued our drive before stopping at 15th Street and Linebaugh Avenue when Montelione spotted sheriff's Deputy Steven Donaldson. He was outside a two-bedroom home where workers were busy hammering, nailing and generally fixing up the place.Donaldson's job with the sheriff's office involves reaching out to the homeless. That's how he found the men working on this house. One was in a cold-weather shelter, another was begging by a roadside. The house they were working on had been abandoned.

The deal is the men do the work, under supervision of another formerly homeless man who has construction skills. They use donated material and when the job is done, they can live there rent-free for a year as they transition back to the workforce. It helps the men and removes an eyesore from the neighborhood.

There isn't a magic wand that will make it better overnight, but revival is starting. 

It's a slow-go that will take years to complete, but it's starting. Think of it as a mosaic, being stitched together one street, one house and one life at a time. 

That's the way it works in North Tampa.

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Deputy Steven Donaldson
Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office
Homeless Initiative
District III Office: (813) 247-033
Email: sdonalds@hcso.tamp.fl.us
Facebook.com/HelpCopsHelpUs 

HelpCopsHelpUs.org

North Tampa's revival is slow, but that's OK

$3 Billion dollars later homeless youth on the rise

I often heard his name and gathered reports of his parking lot appeals — humbly posturing for dollar bills in shopping center lots. But, several weeks would pass before I would first meet the homeless 21 year-old young man named Jesse.

It seems for almost five years Jesse’s homelessness went largely unnoticed until more recently when he became the fixture of accounts as stories of the unkempt young man repeatedly filled my voicemail and email box with near sightings. Even for the fleeting passerby the forsaken exploits of squandered youthfulness rarely goes unnoticed before someone picks up a phone.

 It would be a mid-afternoon in August before I first stumbled upon the likes of Jesse’s description in a disheveled persona walking down a Town N’ Country Street. He darted out of view and it was the police instinct that hunted him down feasting inside a Burger King dining room. Most in a state of homelessness are a little distant when confronted by the police without warning —"Are you Jesse?" it was obvious that he thought twice before responding to my question and when he did his answer came across as defensive.

I introduced myself, “I’m Deputy Donaldson,” and with this announcement there was a sign of relief with his response, “You’re Deputy Donaldson … I’ve been looking for you!” Little did he know that this chance encounter would be the first day that would begin his recovery from the streets.

What saved Jesse from what may have been a life of homelessness is a term we now call street engagement and it is augmented by a modified expression of the long arm of the law. Jesse was homeless for almost five years simply because as a wayward homeless youth on the streets he was left to his own devices without interruption. As it stands right now, by default from a lack of better options, we fully expected Jesse and other homeless youths like him to solve his own problems knowing that his best work got him into this predicament in the first place.

 Many would argue that Jesse is the victim of life’s social ills and perhaps being the product of a wretched and disadvantaged upbringing. And, you may be right on all of these accounts but sympathy by itself won’t solve any of Jesse’s problems — and, sympathy by itself without disruption of his current pattern of behavior could and will make Jesse’s problems much worse. 

The most compelling argument should be the more obvious one considering how long Jesse remained on the streets unfettered and unrestrained: regardless of the homeless recovery mechanism of assistance deployed, regardless of how much money is spent on federal, state, and local programs to help people like Jesse off the streets — if we don’t unearth these homeless youth from their unconstrained slumber and anonymity — if we don’t find them, engage them, and redirect them, we will never be able to help them get off the streets.

We should all accept the fact that there will never be enough money, otherwise known in institutional and non-profit parlance as funding, to solve all of our problems. Since 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that almost $3 Billion dollars is spent annually on federal homeless programs and the fight to end homelessness is nowhere in sight. 

Homeless assistance agencies will never have the required funding to provide the girth of street outreach to make even a dent in the size and scope of our homeless population. So, it’s time to consider some legitimate options that have  more logistical appeal based on the resources that we already have at our disposal.

Could the long arm of the law become an expression for homeless recovery and assistance?

 One of Hillsborough County’s most “incorrigible” homeless men has been arrested a startling eighty times since 1996 which has obvious implications with the associated burden on local county services. Without having to do the math it should be clear that law enforcement agencies already have skin in the game with a seemingly accidental vested interest with the likes of this one man living on the streets. Law enforcement agencies across our nation exhausting assets on similar contributors of blight have a simple business decision to make: would you invest a nickel of your resources to help this same man off the streets to save a dollar in expenses that you would otherwise exhaust when we arrest him more than eighty times?

The appropriate answers should come to us without question when we are headed into a steeper decline of belt tightening and budget cuts. Helping a homeless youth like Jesse and other men and women experiencing similar plight is not only deference to duty as public servants but it is also a resounding and solvent business decision in these fiscally uncertain times.

Efficient and successful homeless recovery is more about establishing relationships through street engagement that thoughtfully disrupts and realigns a wayward soul redirecting them individually towards a path of self sufficiency.

Beyond my beat-cop salary it should prove interesting that this method costs us virtually nothing.

In contrast, conventional and standardized efforts mandate funding the many locks and levers of institutional programs that first require supportive infrastructure and layered management before the first candidate is offered help. I’m certain there is a productive outcome to this mesmerizing madness but if a homeless candidate should successfully navigate the labyrinth of social assistance the follow-up question should be, when compared to the expense: what was the margin of success? 

We have discovered the iconic imagery of the nostalgic beat cop has many problem solving virtues that we can exploit to better our communities and the people within them — but, only if we wield our perceived authority in the right direction and for the right purpose. The young man named Jesse passed through the conventional and standardized system to no avail and landed back on the streets where he fell back in my lap.

Jesse's ultimate success only proves to me that we will not likely be able to buy our way out of our current homeless epidemic so we better start becoming a lot more creative with the resources we already have and spend a lot less money on air-conditioned office space. 

Deputy Steven Donaldson
Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office
Homeless Initiative
District III Office: (813) 247-033
Email: sdonalds@hcso.tamp.fl.us
Facebook.com/HelpCopsHelpUs 

HelpCopsHelpUs.org

Tony with Tampa's Clean City Division Jumps on Board Homes of Second Cha...

Tony is a supervisor with Tampa's Clean City Division. When I first met Tony he thanked the Help Cops Help Us Team for finally cleaning up the Linebaugh Ave home. "It's been an eyesore for more than three years," he said. "We would drive by it almost every day and have to pick up trash accumulated in the front yard."

Tony's remarks are testament that vacant and abandoned homes contribute to blight in the neighborhood. Homes of Second Chances not only restores the lives of the men that are enlisted to fix them up, but it also revitalizes the neighborhood and empowers the community all at the same time!


DEP D

Deputy Steven Donaldson
Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office
Homeless Initiative
District III Office: (813) 247-033
Email: sdonalds@hcso.tamp.fl.us
Facebook.com/HelpCopsHelpUs 

HelpCopsHelpUs.org

Published on Nov 1, 2012 by HCCHawkTV

Hawk TV's Ryan French explores "Homes of Second Chances" and "Youth Aiding Youth." These initiatives help get the homeless off the streets and are led by Deputy Steven Donaldson his son Brent, who is an HCC student.

For more information: http://www.facebook.com/HelpCopsHelpUs