The drone of rain on the car roof is almost deafening. It comes through to the inside like loud TV static. If you peer out the window at the mute downtown scene, between the droplets, you can see that white water pours off storefront awnings like an avalanche. On the flooded sidewalk, huddled in a shallow doorway, a faceless man’s fingers hold a cardboard shield in defense against the damp. The problem of homelessness is never so striking as it is in a rainstorm. An increased supply of short-term shelter is a more immediate solution to this problem which statistics fail to capture.
In Miami, the opulent glass buildings standing in the city center betray the saddening scene playing out, once again, at their feet. Beneath the skirt of the skyscrapers there are multitudes whose only shelter from the rain is a thin canvas awning and a cardboard bed. The common rainstorm which might cause you to jog from your car to your front door is another thing entirely to those who are, as I write this, hunkered under a highway. To commuters, the rain is only Morse code as they drive under the overpass — the irregular gaps in I-95 tapping out a dreary message on the metal roof — but to a homeless person without shelter, the rain is a direct threat. It soaks their belongings. It floods where they sleep at night. It turns manholes into geysers that boil with overflow.
The last time a count was taken, 3,526 people were homeless in Miami-Dade County. Seventy-five percent of those were men. Thirty-eight percent of the unsheltered indicated they had a disability, whether mental, physical or from substance abuse. Forty-four percent did not have a source of income. All of them say their greatest need is shelter and housing. The last homeless census count tells me that more than 1,000 people will not have shelter from rain tonight in my city.
The number is so large that I struggle to wrap my head around it — so large that I can’t get an emotional grip on it. How can one expect to feel grief for that many all at once? It is spread too thin among them, and the whole affair becomes more of an exercise in math than in empathy.
This is why, as you look out your car window in a rainstorm, I will ask you not to think about the thousands of unsheltered people trying to stay dry with little between them and the elements except the clothes on their back. Think only of the one in front of you. Imagine being that individual, disabled or cognitively disoriented and having nothing but a park bench between you and the earth at night.
Hopefully that one-person focus can help you understand why emergency, short-term shelter is so necessary for homeless people. I pray it gives you perspective on being unsheltered on sunny and rainy days alike. I hope, most of all, that you donate to a local homeless shelter that provides emergency housing today. The life of at least one neighbor depends on it.
Stephan Chamberlin is a UF political science junior. His column comes out Tuesday and Thursday.
