Grassroots group urges community to ‘Support Orlando Shelters’

Orlando’s cost of living problem isn’t a question — it’s a known fact. The area’s average rent prices skyrocketed nearly 40 percent from 2019 to 2023. And with rising property insurance and mortgage rates in recent years, owning a modest home — or even renting — has increasingly become out of reach for the average person or family. 

That’s especially true for older adults living on a fixed income — who make up an increasing percentage of the region’s homeless population — and many people working in the region’s booming tourism industry, who often work multiple jobs just to stay afloat as their employers boast millions or even billions of dollars in annual revenue. Nationwide, rent prices have exceeded Americans’ income gains by 325 percent since 1985.

That’s why, when city leaders began exploring the idea of repurposing the vacant Orange County Work Release Center south of downtown into a new homeless shelter last year, some neighbors were quietly shocked by the aggressive opposition to the idea that followed. 

After all, more than 1,000 people were found to be sleeping on the streets in Central Florida last year — a figure that doesn’t take into account families living in hotels or doubled up in others’ homes — and data show that shelter capacity in the region is woefully insufficient to meet the rising need. The state had also just passed a ban on sleeping on public property, just a year after lawmakers banned local governments from enacting rent control to help prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.

Nonetheless, the city’s new shelter idea rapidly spurred an oppositional campaign dubbed “Stop SODO Shelter.” Neighbors began planting anti-shelter signs in their yards, which spread throughout neighborhoods south of downtown near the proposed site on Kaley Street. 

Shelter opponents, drawing on negative stereotypes about homeless people, argued that the new shelter would drive down property values, create an unsafe situation for families, and invite issues such as drug use, aggressive behavior, and burglaries.

“While I do understand the pressing need to address homelessness, I believe the current plan, as it stands, poses a significant risk to the safety and security of the community, and to property values,” one neighbor told the Orlando Sentinel.

City leaders ultimately abandoned the idea last March, after facing sufficient pressure from an organized cadre of neighbors. But others in the neighborhood, who didn’t feel confident enough to speak up at the time, are now organizing a grassroots campaign to urge a reversal, and are broadly urging local governments to invest in systems to support their homeless neighbors.

“We are so past the point of exhausted in resources,” said Lee Perry, founder of the Support Orlando Shelters, a name pointedly shortened to S.O.S, or a cry for help. 

Perry, a local political consultant and environmental activist, formerly worked on staff with Orange County commissioners Nicole Wilson and Kelly Martinez Semrad. Through that, she has insider knowledge of the challenges that leaders, and local nonprofits, face in addressing rising homelessness numbers.

After the Stop SoDO Shelter campaign managed to defeat the Kaley Street shelter proposal, Perry said others in the neighborhood — a quiet minority or majority, depending on who you ask — began contacting her to ask if she could help them organize a campaign to counter the anti-shelter narrative.

“We want to get organized, we just don’t really know how,” Perry recalled hearing from neighbors. “We’re really disturbed by how our community is being represented.”

For the last several months, a group of about five to seven people have consistently attended city and county commission meetings in “Support Orlando Shelters” T-shirts, as part of what Perry describes as a “gentle” public pressure tactic. 

Not only do these group members maintain a consistent presence at government meetings, urging local elected officials to invest in homelessness resources. They also thank city and county leaders for the times they do so.

“The county’s budget is our money, the people’s money,” Kathleen Fitzgerald, wearing a Support Orlando Shelters shirt, told Orange County commissioners earlier this month at a board meeting. “You are merely charged with being good stewards of that money,” she said.

“Having said that,” she added, “I want to thank you for signing off on $39 million in federal grants that will provide funds for the Coalition for the Homeless to build a new shelter for women and children, and $15 million for United Against Poverty to replace and enlarge its food pantry.”

“This is how I want my tax dollars being spent,” she told commissioners. “And I support your continued efforts to make the lives of everyone in Orange County better.”

Rising demand

The city of Orlando and Orange County governments have invested millions of local and federal funds into addressing homelessness and affordable housing development over the past few decades. But Perry said that investment isn’t stretching far enough today in the face of rising demand.

Local food pantries and homeless nonprofits — offering services ranging from shelter, to laundry and mail services, showers, counseling, and case management — are struggling to keep up.

Pastor Scott Billue, founder of the homeless service nonprofit Matthew’s Hope Ministries, isn’t shy about what he thinks. “They’re not even fucking talking about it,” he told Orlando Weekly of local officials. “That’s what pisses me off.”

“They’re not even fucking talking about it. That’s what pisses me off.”

Pastor Scott Billue, founder and head of the nonprofit Matthew’s Hope Ministries

His nonprofit, based out of Winter Garden, provides on-site and mobile outreach to homeless people in Orange and Brevard Counties. Formerly homeless himself, Billue said what most concerns him right now is the rise in homeless seniors, plus adults who are mentally or physically disabled — not mentally ill — who are outliving their caregivers.

“Thirty-five percent of the people walking in my door for services right now are first-time homeless Baby Boomers, and no one is talking about it,” said Billue, who’s 63 years old and a Baby Boomer himself. Part of the issue, he said, is that the upper end of his generation is starting to “die off,”  leaving behind spouses who must find a way alone to cover higher insurance costs and property taxes and weather other inflationary pressures, such as higher gas prices.

“They’ve lived a very normal life up to this point. Had careers. I’ve had everything from literally nurses to NASA engineers to you name it,” said Billue, referring to the approximately 1,300 encounters his nonprofit has with homeless people each week.

Every day, he said they’re serving people who have been arrested under Florida’s new anti-camping ban, which officially took effect in January 2025. Drafted in collaboration with a conservative think tank, the law prohibits people in Florida from sleeping on public property, such as a city bench or on the sidewalk. 

These are people without any other suitable options, who are woken up multiple times per night by the police as a result, according to Billue, simply to be told, “You can’t be here.” People who have the option to shuffle to another location, out of the cops’ view, or go to jail. 

County data show there isn’t enough shelter space to go around — with a shortage of hundreds of shelter beds, as it is — and some existing shelters aren’t suitable for people with certain medical needs or pets that they rely on to keep them safe and provide comfort. 

“If they’re getting improper rest, their situation is going to get worse and they’re going to react more poorly,” Billue said.

He believes city and county leaders have historically “done a lot of throwing money down a dark hole” and want to place the concept of homelessness in a box that can be neatly defined, explained and organized. “I’ve been homeless, trust me. There’s no frickin’ box.”

Every person, or family, on the streets, he argued, is homeless for a different reason. Maybe they lost their job during the pandemic and were evicted. Now, with an eviction on their record, they can’t get a landlord to rent them an apartment. Or, maybe they work 40, or even 50 or 60 hours a week earning minimum wage, and it’s still not enough to afford a safe, reliable rental in Orlando to call home.

Billue believes that local officials should prioritize bringing “those of us that are in the trenches” together to find a way to bring the public and private sectors together to “actually address the issue, rather than kick the can down the street again.”

Stopgap initiatives such as mobile bus shelters — a project led by Matthew’s Hope in Brevard County, through a partnership with the county government — are “just a stepping stone,” he said. “That’s not an answer.”

He recently attended a monthly meeting of Support Orlando Shelters this past month, where he helped train attendees on how to provide public comment during local government meetings and offered suggestions on what they could say, or do, to have the most impact.

“We don’t need to be ugly about this, but we need to sit there and get them to start thinking differently,” Billue said.

Strength in numbers

Support Orlando Shelters currently meets monthly at the Broadway United Methodist Church in Lake Eola Heights, hosts mutual aid drives, and uses its email list of about 200 people to mobilize members to city council and county commission meetings, if they have the time to show up. (Most meetings occur weekday mornings or afternoons, severely limiting the ability of many residents to be there.)

“What we really want to do is inspire folks who maybe have never spoken at a public comment meeting before to maybe come out and speak one time,” said Perry. “And then maybe challenge yourself to maybe meet with your local commissioner, whether at the city or the county level, and ask them to do a little bit more.”

They’ve invited activists involved with the anti-shelter movement to join their meetings, and they’ve also invited local homeless service providers, the Farmworker Association, and government officials such as city commissioner Patty Sheehan and Orange County commissioners Kelly Semrad and Mayra Uribe (who’s running for Orange County mayor this year) to speak as well.

Perry said that most homeless nonprofit providers in the area, save for Billue perhaps, are too afraid to air their concerns about local government investments publicly, for fear that they’ll risk receiving additional public funding in the future.

Orange County is currently considering a proposal to build a new 150-bed shelter in the Goldenrod area east of downtown — a project that Support Orlando Shelters supports, with caveats. 

According to Perry, the shelter likely won’t be completed or ready for years to come, if it’s even approved. She compared that question mark of a location to the vacant Work Release Center on Kaley Street that already has bunk beds, lockers, vending machines, and approved permitting and licensing for things such as a ceiling hood in the kitchen for food preparation.

“The Goldenrod shelter is a fantastic opportunity,” Perry said. But, “How many years is it going to take to get, you know, some flesh on the bones with that project?”

Consistency is Support Orlando Shelters’ current priority. A consistent presence at local government meetings. Consistent monthly meetings. And, ideally, consistently bringing more people into the group to show the community — and its elected leaders — that they can’t incarcerate the problem of homelessness away.

Most people don’t want to go alone to a government meeting, said Billue. “But when they start getting a handful of people that will go out together, they feel a lot more empowered. And I’m hoping to see that happen with this group.”

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