Orlando’s homeless services organizations held a memorial service for the unhoused people who died in 2025, with one real estate professional warning that homelessness could rise if home prices don’t ease.
“My desk is where the American dream comes to die because of where the situation is right now,” Kristi Nowrouzi, a mortgage loan officer with Homelendia Mortgage, told Homes.com.
Roughly 100 people gathered in Heritage Square Park in front of the Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando on Wednesday morning. The park is often a hub for the city’s homeless population.
The event, in its 12th year, was sponsored by the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, Celebration Church and IDignity, a charity that works to supply unhoused individuals with identification and documentation.
“This is an opportunity for us to recognize the people that we serve on a daily basis,” Heather Payne, a paralegal with IDignity, told Homes.com.
The Rev. Vance Rains, senior pastor at First United Methodist Church of Orlando, opened the proceedings with an invocation of “the God of compassion and love.” From there, a parade of speakers offered prayers, readings of scripture and messages of comfort.
Volunteers read out the names of the deceased — 136 in all — ringing a bell after each one. The Rev. Mary Lee Downey of the Kissimmee-based Hope Partnership said a blessing for the one unidentified person in the community who died this year.
“It is always our goal that no homeless person pass unnamed,” she said to the crowd.
Homes are getting out of reach
People were invited to write down comments about those who passed. Many of the participants were volunteers with the organizations who had grown to know those who died.
The audience learned that one of the lost had been “kind and hard-working” and that another had friends and family who thought of him as “a funny jokester” who would give someone in need the shirt off his back.
Nowrouzi, who is also the vice president of IDignity’s board of directors, made the closing remarks. In an interview afterward, she said the extreme rise in prices since the pandemic is making it harder to get people into homes.
“Most people are living hand-to-mouth and cannot afford to save money,” she said, "because then you’re choosing food in your kids’ mouths versus money in a savings account.”
She said she was concerned about the rising number of Federal Housing Administration loan defaults. A July report from the Urban Institute showed that FHA delinquencies had risen from a low of 3.7% in the second quarter of 2024 to 4.8% by February 2025.
Nowrouzi put much of the blame on the rise in home prices, which have grown 51% nationally since January 2020, according to Homes.com research. In metropolitan Orlando, the National Housing Conference finds that a household needs an income of $131,487 a year to afford a median-priced home with a 10% down payment and not be cost-burdened. Households are considered cost-burdened when they spend more than a third of their income on housing.
“And that’s presuming you have a down payment,” Nowrouzi said. “It’s an escalating problem.”
During remembrances, Brad Sefter with Healthcare Center for the Homeless offered a stark message to the audience.
“This is a call to action,” he read. “Homelessness isn’t just about housing. It’s a life-shortening condition.”