By Faith Montalvo
There is a homeless population outside the University of Tampa (UT). On the outskirts of the campus, only a few are seen on campus grounds due to UT being private property and maintaining its image and safety for the campus community.
A man stood in a thick jacket and blanket at the side of West Brorein Street in the first week of the spring semester, holding a cardboard sign and watching the cars pass by him. In the last week of January, another man was sitting on the steps of the SOHO Wellness & Med Spa with a full shopping cart in front of him. These two areas are an 11-minute and five-minute walk from UT.
Isabella Monti, a junior student and one of the Student Coordinators at the PEACE Volunteer Center, said she sees homeless people in Plant Park on her way to school. She only sometimes sees Campus Safety patrolling the outskirts of the campus, except at night.
While it’s difficult to accurately determine how many people are experiencing homelessness through Point-In-Time (PIT) Counts, the Tampa Hillsborough Homeless Initiative (THHI) counted 2,040 people experiencing homelessness on one day within Hillsborough County in 2023. This was an increase of 527 people since 2022.
Although THHI did not record the number of homeless people in Downtown Tampa, the area that included the city was the densest area where they collected their surveys, according to the map in their report. The Tampa Bay Times also reported concerning The Portico’s annual vigil that memorialized 110 people who died in Tampa while being homeless on the streets in 2023.
Even though the numbers available cannot fully describe the homeless population, they do show the prevalence of homelessness in the county and city.
Lincoln Cutler, a senior student at UT and former president of Spartans Against Homelessness, said, “The homeless population in Tampa is very human. Each of them has a story, and each has a unique experience, and most of the time, they don’t get to share it.”
The reason why people experiencing homelessness do not come on campus grounds, even though homelessness surrounds the campus, is because UT is a private university and private property. This contrasts with public universities like the University of New Mexico. According to an article by the UNM Newsroom in May 2023, unhoused people are “spotted all around campus.” The University of New Mexico is a public campus, unlike UT.
If Campus Safety notices a homeless person, an officer will ask them for their identification and why they are on the campus. They could be asked to leave if they do not have a business or an academic reason for coming onto the campus.
“Once they notice them there, if they don’t leave by their own accord, Campus Safety will remove them,” said Cutler.
“The University of Tampa, with all due respect, has a very high regard for its public image,” said Dr. Damien Contessa, Advisor for Spartans Against Homelessness and Sociology Professor. “And it’s also a safety issue to some degree or another that the university tries to do its best to maintain the integrity of the boundaries for students and faculty and administrators.”
Referring to the homeless on the outskirts of campus, Morgan McDaniel, a junior and Student Coordinator of the PEACE Volunteer Center, said, “I don’t think about it much; I feel safe enough being on campus.”
“It’s not really an issue,” McDaniel added, “I’m definitely apprehensive, but I’m a twenty-year-old woman in the middle of a city, so I’m cautious of anyone. It doesn’t really matter what you look like.”
“The homeless population is part of the community, and there are homeless people who pass around campus, through campus at times, so we are aware of them,” said Samuel Ponce, the Associate Director of Campus Safety.
He said that Campus Safety has a relationship with the homeless, and being homeless is not a factor in asking someone to leave the campus. Instead, whether an individual creates a safety hazard for the community is Campus Safety’s focus in asking someone to leave campus.
Referring to the interactions that Campus Safety has had with the homeless in the past, Ponce said, “They do go around, and sometimes they walk through, but it’s always a positive interaction.”
Based on Ponce’s experience, he could not recall a negative experience between the homeless and the Campus Safety officers.
“Treat others how you want to be treated, treat others with respect, treat everyone as if they were royalty, and you’ll never have a problem,” said Ponce.
Most of the time, people experiencing homelessness will leave without conflict and on their own accord when asked to, and the number of homeless people Campus Safety asks to leave the campus grounds is also very low in comparison to people who are not homeless.
Ponce said that when students or faculty call them to report someone, the caller often describes the person as “suspicious.” Officers then ask questions concerning the situation, and then they may be dispatched to approach the suspicious person and ask them why they are on UT’s campus. Based on the “totality of the situation,” as Ponce said, the officer will then ask the person to leave.
“They know the community better than anybody; they’ve been living here a lot longer than we’ve been working or going to school here,” Ponce said. “So they understand that this is a private university. We do have some public streets, but they understand the privacy of this campus.”