ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Orange County Commissioner Maribel Gomez Cordero, in partnership with the First United Methodist Church, is hosting a town hall at 5 p.m. Thursday to discuss the homeless crisis.

The meeting, at the First United Methodist Church on Dean Road, comes about a week after Orange and Osceola counties passed a ban on public camping, and Gomez Cordero was one of two Orange commissioners to vote against the ordinance.

The ordinance was adopted last week to comply with House Bill 1365, a law passed by the Florida Legislature requiring cities and counties to make their own policies cutting down on public camping. HB 1365 went into effect Oct. 1, 2024. As of the start of 2025, the law started allowing residents, business owners and the state attorney general to sue local governments for not arresting people for sleeping on public land.

Homeless Services Network President and Chief Executive Officer Martha Are said she believes it’s a law that has forced the hand of local governments to criminalize people who are homeless. 

“We’re aware of increases in arrests over the past several months since the state legislation was even beginning to be talked about and then was passed, and the timeline for it to be implemented,” Are said. “I think that data would show that there has been increases trending upward for many months.”

According to Are, the number of people experiencing homelessness nearly doubled from 2022 to 2024, and the number of available beds for those people remains the same. Coupled with the rising cost of living, resources to get people off the streets have been stretched even thinner, Are said.

Are, like many advocacy groups, said she believes Florida legislators approved the law without addressing the real issue, which is providing an adequate number of beds for the unhoused.

“A part of the challenge, again, with the legislation is that it did not come with adequate resources to support the additional shelter bed capacity that would be needed across the state to assure that people have an option, of a place inside to sleep and not on public property,” Are said.

Being homeless is not an experience most people would choose, she said.

As Orange County has worked to enforce this new ordinance, some people have been arrested. The past week of the Orlando Police and Orange County Sheriff’s offices’ booking reports show several arrests that list the common reason as “camping prohibited,” which the reports say is a misdemeanor. Violators of the “no public camping” ordinance could face a $500 fine and up to 60 days in jail.