Zebra Coalition still aims to buy hotel for homeless youth – News 13 Orlando

ORLANDO, Fla. — It’s calm and quiet in the abandoned hotel parking lot behind the bustling 200 block of East Colonial Drive.

Just a few feet away, colorful doors line another, similar building at Faith Arts Village — another former hotel on the same property, this one renovated into a family-friendly space with 36 artist studios and galleries. 

Nearby Park Lake Presbyterian Church owns both hotel properties, and the Zebra Coalition hopes to purchase and renovate the vacant one into affordable apartment units for young LGBTQ+ people who are experiencing homelessness.

Already, the Central Florida nonprofit has helped house approximately 800 at-risk youth through its transitional and rapid rehousing programs, executive director Heather Wilkie said, noting it is an example of the group’s current impact as well as what it has the potential to do for the community. If the Park Lake housing project moves forward as planned, it will triple the number of young people Zebra can serve.

“We’re at capacity, over capacity,” Wilkie said of the group’s current housing situation. “We always have a waiting list.”

Wilkie estimates about 35 percent of all homeless youth currently on the streets of Orlando identify as LGBTQ+.

When bipartisan lawmakers approved $750,000 for the hotel renovation in next year’s state budget, Wilkie and other local advocates felt confident about the project’s outlook. It wasn’t enough, but it would be a huge step forward to achieving what Wilkie estimates could end up being a $1.7 million job.

However, earlier this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed all the funding set aside for the project. The governor’s veto made national news, with advocates decrying not just that veto but another, smaller budget item DeSantis vetoed for the LGBT+ Center Orlando, which would have funded counseling for victims of the 2016 Pulse massacre. 

Combined with the governor’s approval the day before of a statewide ban on transgender students in women’s and girls’ sports — signed on the first day of Pride month — some said DeSantis sent a message that he did not support the LGBTQ+ community. 

“He was trying to send a message … that he was not prioritizing LGBTQ issues; in fact, he was rejecting them,” said Democratic state House Rep. Anna Eskamani of Orlando, who helped secure the Zebra Coalition project’s funding during Florida’s recent legislative session.

The governor’s office wrote in a statement to Spectrum News that it’s normal to sign state budgets in June.

“The suggestion that the Governor is sending a hidden message of some sort, by signing the budget during Pride Month, is a borderline conspiracy theory,” Press Secretary Christina Pushaw wrote.

For her part, Wilkie said after the veto, many community members began contributing to the hotel project. She also said the group hopes to apply for grants and take advantage of any and all local funding they’re eligible for.

“I feel very positive and very confident that we will end up making this happen. We have to make it happen. Because the alternative is that our youth do not have anywhere to reside,” she said.

‘Dying to be somewhere’

About 40% of the young LGBTQ+ people seeking help from Zebra Coalition do so because of family rejection, according to the group’s website.

Reginald Collins, 23, is part of that number. 

Collins goes by a different name than his “government” name, as he calls it, because he was named after his father, who Collins describes as incredibly abusive.

“I don’t want that kind of hate in my life,” Collins said of his family, who he doesn’t remain in contact with. His grandparents disowned him after Collins’s father outed him as gay, he said.

After fleeing his Sumter County home for Orlando at 17, Collins experienced homelessness. He eventually made his way into Zebra Coalition’s transitional, or “bridge” housing, one of the group’s two housing programs. The other, a federally-subsidized rapid rehousing program, helps house about 32 youth on a more long-term basis, Wilkie said.

The bridge program Collins is in can house up to 11 youth at any given time, between rooms Zebra rents out at a family-style home and Home Suite Home, an extended-stay hotel. That hotel is where Collins stays.

Zebra doesn’t put a strict time limit on how long bridge housing residents can stay, Wilkie said, as long as youth keep working on their individualized plan, which a case manager helps develop. The ultimate goal is to help youth integrate more permanently into the community. 

For Collins, part of that integration includes recently finding a full-time job he loves at Aspire Health Partners, where he’s part of a recovery program for men struggling with substance abuse and mental health. Some have even struggled with homelessness. Helping those people now feels like a “360 moment,” Collins said. 

“When you’re homeless, you don’t think about anything but ‘I need somewhere to stay,’” he said. “When you finally have a roof over your head, you have a bed to go to every night, you’re like, ‘OK, I have some place to stay. What’s my next plan?’”

For Collins, now married and planning to eventually rent his own local apartment, the significance of Zebra Coalition is simple:

“I’m not on the street,” he said. “I’m not dying to be somewhere.”

An affordable housing solution

Renovating old hotels into apartment units is one way to create some of the new affordable housing Central Florida desperately needs. 

“It also helps to lift up a community to see that we are investing in old property to revamp it for a new purpose,” Eskamani said. “So many times, we see that take place for gentrification purposes.”

“Now this project is actually not to remove people from the community, it’s bringing folks into the community who will add to the fabric of support and grow within that space,” Eskamani said.

In April, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated almost $254 million to Florida to address homelessness, as part of the American Rescue Plan Act’s $5 billion budget for homelessness assistance. The money is tied to HUD’s HOME Investment Partnerships Program, which funds the creation of affordable housing and supportive services for low-income people. The agency’s full breakdown of HOME-ARP funds allocated to states and localities — including Central Florida counties and cities — can be found here. 

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Molly Duerig is a Report for America corps member who is covering affordable housing for Spectrum News 13. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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