To The Homeless, The Road To Mickey Is A Cold And Dark Road

This is part two of a three-part series in titled "Homeless In The Shadows Of Mickey."

"Dear mom, How are you all doing I hope good...I need a job and I need help...Living out here is killing me slowly I mean I can feel my body is dying slowly on me."

This was the letter that Richard Scott Archer Jr wrote to his mother while lying on a sidewalk outside of a church in Orlando, Florida. which was published by the Washington Post in June.

Three months before he wrote the letter, the 32 year-old had a nice job working for UPS and was renting a apartment for $675-a-month with his girlfriend. All of a sudden, after his shift ended one night, he and twenty of his co-workers were approached by their supervisor and told they were no longer needed.

Now unemployed, Richard was unable to pay the rent and watched helplessly as his apartment slipped away; and to add insult to injury, his girlfriend slipped away as well. All of a sudden, Richard found himself among Orlando's growing homeless population. When Washington Post writer Theresa Vargas caught up with Richard outside of a church in downtown Orlando on that hot and sticky day in June, she could tell he was not homeless for very long, some of his socks were still white. "My buddy here, he's a truck driver," Archer to Vargas who was pointing to a man who was curled up beside him sleeping."He had just got his license renewed when he was laid off."

Stories like Richard repeats itself everyday in Orlando, the top tourist destination in the United States. In a region where Mickey Mouse, Harry Potter and Shamu is king, beneath the surface lies a problem that seem to be growing worse everyday. According to the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, in 2009 (the latest year these figures were released) over 10,000 people are homeless in Metro Orlando (which covers the counties of Orange, Seminole and Osceola). Orange County, the largest county in the metropolitan area with a population of over 1 million residents, holds 63 percent of the homeless population, while Osceola County has 18 percent and Seminole with 16 percent. "The economy is just spitting out homeless people in droves," lead researcher James White, who is a sociology professor at the University of Central Florida told the Orlando Sentinel in a May 2009 article which detailed the growing homeless problem plaguing Central Florida. Wright has studied the poor and homeless for years. "A lot of these families were living right on the economic edge -- and now that economic edge has retreated".

To Robert Wooten and Marie Hancock, the economic edge has certinly retreated.

In the same Washington Post story in June, Robert came from Tennessee, apart of a growing migration of construction workers who came to Florida looking for work, only to find that the construction jobs vanished when the housing bubble burst. Now, his ankle is shattered and he now depends on a wheelchair to get around. His fiance, Marie Hancock, ended up homeless after losing her job at Universal Studios eight months after encountering family problems. Marie's parents think she is in a shelter because she does not want her parents to worry about her.

You would think that with a homeless problem growing worse everyday, that Central Florida leaders would rally to do something about the problem. But, what we have seen coming out of Orlando and other Central Florida communities show that the exact opposite is happening.

In Orlando, the laws dealing with the homeless are so cruel that Orlando has been named one of the meanest cities in the country by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty and the National Coalition for the Homeless. The Orlando city council has done everything to make the homeless problem simply go away. In September 2009, the city enacted a solicitation-free zone. Inside the area, 24 "exempt zones", 3 feet by 15 feet, were created in which panhandlers -- and people who distributed fliers -- could beg or disperse information. Anyone who was caught panhandling outside of the "little poor boxes", as the Orlando Weekly called them, risked being arrested. Orlando has went as far as being accused of "dumping" the homeless in surrounding counties to installing "homeless meters" where people could drop there spare change in repurposed parking meters instead of handing them to people that need it the most.

Orlando has had a shaky relationship with the homeless for years. But in 2006, the city went to the extreme. That year, the city instituted a homeless feeding ban in city parks. Under the ordinance, large groups such as Food Not Bombs and Vagabonds Church of God, had to apply for a permit, in which only two were allowed per year, to share food with more than twenty-five people in downtown parks such as Lake Eola. Anybody who violated this law faced a sixty day jail sentenced and a $500 fine. The reason behind the ordinance was to preserve the family atmostphere around downtown parks and seeing a large number a homeless people eating in a park caused safety and sanitary problems.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), FVCG and the Orlando chapter of Food Not Bombs sued the city, claiming that the ordinance violated the rights to free speech, free assembly, free association and freedom of religion. In 2008, a federal judge struck down the ban on behalf of the FVCG citing that their was no rational need for the ban and found that it did violated the first amendment. But the city appealed and in 2011, the federal courts upheld the ban, citing that the restrictions were reasonable. With the ban now law, in June, Food Not Bombs defined the ordinance and four Food Not Bombs volunteers were arrested for violating the ordinance. Spurred on by the Orlando ban, the city of Sanford, which is just north of Orlando in Seminole County, is discussing it's own ordinance to clamp down on the people who help the needy. The Sanford ban would restrict panhandling and prohibit feedings in the park.

This is what being homeless in Orlando is like.

People who flock here from other parts of the country in search of a better life, have only found misery, despair, hopelessness and a city that is more willing to make them invisible then truly help those in desperate need. As Richard Scott Archer wrote in his letter to his family in Wall Township, New Jersey:

"It's Saterday night and I am sleeping at a churche They only let us sleep there on Sateday nights ok Mom but I'm ok You don't have to worry about me at all Ok I love you all But I don't no how much more I can take out here."

For Richard and thousands of homeless men, woman and children, the road to Mickey gets colder and bleaker.

Coming Monday: Many local charities and outreach programs are trying their best to change the lives of the men, woman and children who call Central Florida streets home. I will spotlight the charities and outreach programs who are truly making a difference.