How a Texas-based think tank upended Florida’s homelessness strategy

The critical elements of Florida’s bold new statewide homelessness policy emerged from the written prescriptions of a Texas-based conservative think tank bent on thwarting the nation’s “homeless-industrial complex,” according to records obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

Emails show the Cicero Institute offered Florida lawmakers a menu of reforms last summer, sending them to the staff of House Speaker Paul Renner in July. It then worked persistently to secure the passage of House Bill 1365, which banned public camping and sought to move unsheltered people from sidewalks to sanctioned, highly structured encampments.

So successful were the Institute’s efforts in the Sunshine State that when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill in March, Cicero’s co-founder, billionaire tech investor and GOP mega-donor Joe Lonsdale cheered it as setting an example for the rest of the country to follow.

“When we started working on homelessness, many people considered these ideas fringe. Activists have vociferously opposed us at every turn. It takes guts to stand up to the homeless-industrial complex,” Lonsdale wrote in a blog post. “This is the strongest set of homelessness reforms in the nation, and we were proud to work with Florida leaders to see them adopted.”

And Cicero has many ideas about how Florida – and other states – can go further.

Also included in the policy memo, which the Sentinel obtained among other documentation of Cicero’s efforts in a public records request, are reform proposals making it easier to involuntarily commit somebody to psychiatric treatment, banning local care organizations from pursuing so-called “Housing First” initiatives to address homelessness, and funneling money toward mental health and substance abuse treatment instead.

Advocacy groups and organizations on the ground fear these policies – and Florida’s new law – will make their work to treat and combat homelessness even more challenging. Since the law’s requirements for sanctioned encampments make those facilities difficult to fund, locate and operate, and shelters are full most every night, it’s likely to force law enforcement to arrest people who have nowhere else to go but the streets, they say.

“What I anticipate though is this becomes a checklist,” said Martha Are, the CEO of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, assessing the influence of Cicero’s policy menu.

Cicero’s approach is not unique. Across the country, interest groups are pushing state legislatures to write their ideas into law, and some of the most successful have been conservative organizations working with GOP-led legislatures like Florida’s. The Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability, for example, has pushed labor law changes that critics say weaken protections for child workers, scoring a signal success last year in Arkansas.

Cicero has interests in other issues as well, but its main focus has been homelessness, a vexing issue that has increasingly preoccupied state and local governments in Florida and elsewhere.

In the Orlando area alone, homelessness has increased 75% over the past five years, which providers and advocates say is a reflection of the region’s soaring housing costs and shortage of affordable units.

In the same five-year timeframe, rents increased nearly $600 per month.

Currently, the nation’s predominant strategy to combat homelessness is called Housing First, an approach to end a person’s homelessness as quickly as possible by placing a roof over their heads, often in a hotel or an available apartment. Then, the person receives other services such as mental health or substance abuse treatment, job training and other needs, in hopes they can sustain their new lifestyle.

“Housing First is treatment,” said Eric Gray, the CEO of the Christian Service Center, which operates Orlando’s day services center for the homeless said in an email. “Science shows us that trying to treat an individual for ANY medical condition is near impossible if they aren’t also in stable housing.  Housing IS healthcare.”

Andrew Sullivan, a University of Central Florida researcher specializing in homelessness, said his research and that of others routinely reveals the merits of the strategy of providing housing, and that laws like Florida’s public camping ban don’t reduce homelessness.

Cicero disagrees, attributing homelessness to untreated mental illnesses. It’s trying to move states away from Housing First principles to its slate of alternatives, said Devon Kurtz, who wrote the memo to Renner and oversees the think tank’s homelessness policy.

“What Cicero cares about most is getting states engaged on this issue,” Kurtz said. “For the past three decades, it’s been ceded to the federal government through continuums of care.”

Along with its success on the camping ban, Cicero scored a little-noticed victory over Housing First in Florida by securing budget language that requires recipients of state challenge grants typically used to house people to instead “prioritize mental health and substance abuse treatment” as well as short-term shelters, sanctioned camping sites and safe parking sites.

That grant program accounted for $20 million last year, with the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida receiving about $900,000.

Cicero initially sought to outright ban use of the grants for any Housing First or permanent housing program, but state leaders held off on going that far.

Are said that rising homelessness numbers aren’t a reflection on the Housing First strategy, but instead a commentary on a tight housing market.

“To blame Housing First is kind of like blaming the emergency room for how many people came in with COVID during the peak of the COVID crisis,” Are said. “The emergency room was implementing the best interventions they could, but they could not control how many people were getting infected with the virus.”

So far, Cicero has helped get bills passed similar to Florida’s camping ban in Republican-led states including Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Kentucky. The group says that the steps Florida is taking on homelessness policy beyond its ban makes its approach the nation’s “strongest.”

In Florida, Lonsdale has donated at least $213,000 to politicians and politician committees over the past three years through his company Lonsdale Enterprises. That included $50,000 to a committee controlled by DeSantis, $10,000 to another controlled by Renner and $60,000 to the Republican Party of Florida.

A few weeks after the memo was sent to Renner, Lonsdale contributed more than $23,000 of food and drinks to the Republican Party of Florida. The emails show Renner met with Cicero representatives at a conference last summer in Utah. Lonsdale also hosted a fundraiser in support of DeSantis’ presidential bid.

While Cicero representatives never testified publicly about the camping ban bill, its lobbyist worked with lawmakers and staff on it prior to and during the three-month-long session, the records show. Legislative staffers solicited the group’s input.

For example, in October, months before the session began in January, a House staffer emailed one of Cicero’s lobbyists about the plan: “where is Cicero on the questions/follow up we discussed in our meeting on the homelessness proposals?”

Garrison, who carried the bill through the House, is slated to be a future House Speaker.

It’s unclear what level of interest Florida leaders have in Cicero’s other homeless policy proposals. Renner, Garrison and Daniel Perez, the incoming House speaker, didn’t respond to emailed questions and a request for an interview.

Kurtz wasn’t sure either, but was hopeful.

“We hope so,” he said of Florida implementing the remainder of Cicero’s package.  “In future sessions, we do hope to work more on the mental health and substance abuse side.”

rygillespie@orlandosentinel.com