Daytona Beach, FL – The man hired by Daytona Beach to solve the city’s homeless problem wants every other Volusia city to buy into the concept of a 24/7 county-wide shelter aimed at “graduating” people from a life on the streets.
Dr. Robert Marbut – a former San Antonio [Texas] City Councilman turned homelessness expert – joined Daytona’s Morning News on WNDB Wednesday morning to speak about the Safe Harbor project, which he plans to go into more detail on during a public meeting at 6pm Wednesday at the Piggotte Community Center in South Daytona.
A similar meeting was held by Marbut Monday night at Volusia County Baptist Church in Orange City.
No other public meetings are scheduled at this time as the man with the nickname of “Dr. Tough Love” tries to drum up support and tax dollars for Safe Harbor.
Marbut – who was hired by the City of Daytona Beach 18 months ago as a consultant – argues that the only way to solve the homeless problem is to address the root causes, something he says the shelter will help do along with give the homeless food and a roof over their heads while they get their life back together.
“You have to measure things like graduation rates, percent of people in jail that are homeless, misuse of emergency rooms and street-level homeless,” Marbut added. “I don’t measure how many people are in a bed. I don’t measure how many utensils we give out, or toiletry kits we give out, or T-shirts, or suntan lotion, or donuts at the park. Those are meaningless measures ’cause they don’t move the root cause.”
Marbut said that substance abuse and mental issues are the main factors behind homelessness locally, with domestic violence also playing a role, especially for women and children.
He also argued that the current solutions in place – primarily, throwing homeless in jail and/or giving them food and other basics without forcing them to follow a plan to get off the streets – will cost taxpayers more in the long run that the shelter will and have little to no actual effect on reducing homelessness.
“Incarceration is 5 times the cost of what we do and it doesn’t work,” Marbut said. “You don’t get recovery in a park bench and you don’t get recovery in a jail cell. Where you get recovery are solid, good programs. But you have to be in a 24/7 program.”
During the interview, Marbut said one of the biggest misnomers he discovered about Volusia’s homeless population – which he estimates is in the hundreds – is that it’s just on the east side of the county, primarily in Daytona Beach.
“It’s evenly distributed across the county east and west,” Marbut noted. “But it has a different makeup. The east side is very visual, very open, right along the linear pathways. The west side is more a wooded area.”
Marbut’s research showed that those homeless with some kind of skill to survive in the woods – primarily former military – gravitated to west Volusia, while those more comfortable with the urban setting went towards Daytona Beach.
Marbut admitted during the interview that he expected the concept of Safe Harbor – a 400-bed facility that would be built next to the Volusia County Jail branch west of Daytona Beach – not to be approved by every city in Volusia, but he feels that there could be enough interested parties to get the idea rolling.
Deltona leaders have already refused to pony up the $300,000 or so that was asked of the city to help fund Safe Harbor, claiming that its homeless problem didn’t justify that sort of expense.
Volusia has agreed to donate the land for Safe Harbor and $4 million to build it if the county’s municipal governments agree to fund the operation to the tune of $1.6 million a year for at least the next 5 years.
Once the funding from the cities is in place, Marbut estimates the shelter can break ground and be ready fairly quickly, possibly by the end of 2016.
“That’s literally the last thing to fall,” Marbut stated. “If that falls, this project can be up and opening and you’d start to see [a] benefit within 9 months.”
In the meantime, homeless advocates behind the “Shelter Can’t Wait” campaign are pushing local leaders to create a temporary shelter for the homeless until Safe Harbor is ready to go.
Marbut and other supporters of Safe Harbor plan to go to local city council and commission meetings in the near future to formally ask Volusia’s municipal goverments to support the project.
A plan is also in the works to create a special food and beverage sales tax to help fund Safe Harbor in the future.
Click here for more details on the Safe Harbor project, based in part on a similar shelter Marbut helped create in the Tampa area.
Copyright 2015 Southern Stone Communications.