Lowering A City's Homeless Population — By Forcing The Homeless Out

It's been a week of goodbyes at the Homeless Voice in Hollywood, Fla. For nearly 13 years, this rundown, 22-room hotel operated as a homeless shelter.

On most nights, hotel manager Christine Jordan says, more than 200 homeless men and women stayed here, some sleeping on mats in the cafeteria.

"We called this the emergency level ... almost 40 people in here every night," she says. Some stayed for free and others paid on a sliding scale. "[Now], everything's gone. I can't cry anymore."

It all came to an end last week, when the city of Hollywood closed a deal with the shelter's owner, Sean Cononie, a homeless advocate and entrepreneur. Hollywood bought Cononie's hotel and several other properties for $4.8 million. More than 100 of the shelter's residents boarded buses and headed to new quarters in Central Florida, 200-plus miles away. Some others made their way into the county shelter system.

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