chapotraphouse

for context, Lake Eola is the large lake / public park in downtown Orlando where they banned giving food to poor people. the climate of central florida is generally associated with not freezing to death, but the city's institutions are very hostile to the unhoused, among others. as i understand it, there used to be some shelters and other service providing organizations in parts of downtown orlando, but they were all shuttered and dismantled to appease developers starting at some point in the 90s and through today.

orlando is also a poster child for the periodic destruction of black neighborhoods and communities through infrastructure projects and withholding of basic services, starting back in the 1880s. a more recent example is the interstate highway system, in a story that is common to many cities in the US, the federal project was used to obliterate black owned communities. however, unlike many of those stories, in orlando, the federal government preferred to run the interstate highway west of downtown. the politically connected white capitalists pulled strings and had it moved. similar efforts by the same interests managed to have shelters, clinics and basic social services all shuttered in what remained of the isolated black communities downtown.

orlando is one of the biggest and most egregiously evil shitholes ever devised by the mind of men, but the media is tightly controlled to maintain the illusion that orlando is a family friendly place to vacation. and i'm sure it is if you stay in an all inclusive mouse-themed resort well outside of downtown. but at the edges, the shadows where the illumination of glittering spectacle don't quite reach, orlando is something else. hunched over, rent-burdened sub minimum wage service workers find pest-infested housing run by slumlords and police silently monitoring weekly evictions of entire families from substandard housing because they couldn't come up with $1200 to pay for an SRO with no kitchen or fridge. orlando is a social murder machine fueled by the illusion that it is anything else.