Thoughts and prayers are heartwarming. Platitudes are great for rallying the troops to a cause. But you know what they don’t do? Fix anything. What does that take, money?
Along with the repeal of the camping ban, Mr. Adler and the all-Democrat city council appropriated more than $73 million for homeless-related services in 2020, a record for the city. It was so much money that the city had trouble spending it. By December Austin had doled out only 57%, or $42.3 million, which still amounted to tens of thousands of dollars per homeless person. Yet the problem kept getting worse.
The City of Austin, Texas, has a homeless problem. Wags will claim it’s because California sent its homeless down to Austin, but that’s neither here nor there. Whether people are from Austin or came there to enjoy the weather, they’re still there. And Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, wanted very much to help them. So he tried his best.
At the time, Mr. Adler said the answer to Austin’s homelessness problem wasn’t to arrest people for sleeping on the streets, an approach he called “ineffective and inconsistent with the character of this city.” He offered more publicly funded housing and services for the homeless, following the “Housing First” policy mantra of West Coast cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. “We need places where homeless folks can be safe and surrounded by social workers and others getting them the help and support they need,” Mr. Adler said.
The root causes of homelessness, or houselessness as advocates prefer because they believe it will be less stigmatizing, as if it’s not stigmatizing enough to be without a home, are varied, ranging from substance abuse to bad choices to circumstances beyond the individual’s control. Some find comfort in blaming the homeless for their circumstance, which is not only wrong, but deeply counterproductive. Homelessness is not only a problem for those people, families, children, who endure it, but everyone else. Fixing the problem matters. Blaming is worthless.
Fixing, however, requires two things. First, identifying the problems to be fixed, without emotional excuses and with a hard recognition that it won’t be fixed by sprinkling fairy dust over tent cities. Second, by coming up with plans that will work for everyone, not just the homeless but everyone.
The vote came amid a homelessness crisis in the city caused almost entirely by Mr. Adler and the Austin City Council’s 2019 decision to rescind a 23-year-old ordinance that prohibited camping in public places such as sidewalks, city parks and highway medians, as well as ordinances against panhandling and sitting or lying down in public. The predictable result was the emergence of San Francisco-style homeless encampments all over the city, especially downtown, which was soon inundated with aggressive panhandling, public intoxication and debris-strewn tent cities.
The people of Austin aren’t a bunch of Texas conservative yahoos. Some argue that Austin isn’t really Texas, but some northern city that got lost in the Republic of Texas. The city is strongly Democrat and, as Texas goes, deeply progressive. But even the passionate have their limits, and that turned out to be “inundated with aggressive panhandling, public intoxication and debris-strewn tent cities.”
Despite more money than the city could figure out how to throw at the problem, it not only didn’t go away, but got worse. Who could have known that becoming a magnet for tent cities with “tens of thousands of dollars per homeless person” would drawn in evermore people without shelter?
Austin had the will and the money to fix the problem, but it had no plan. What happens when you don’t and the City doesn’t want to deal with it? A referendum.
When it came time for voting, Mr. Adler and Councilman Greg Casar, who initially sponsored the repeal of the camping ban, campaigned hard against the measure, speaking at a spuriously named “Homes Not Handcuffs” rally on the University of Texas campus. Beto O’Rourke amplified the mischaracterization, tweeting, “The answer to homelessness is not camping nor is it criminalizing those experiencing homelessness.”
They’re right that the answer to homelessness isn’t handcuffs. But what it isn’t doesn’t contribute anything to what the answer is.
Proposition B passed by a vote of 57% to 43%, which means a lot of Democrats supported it. And no wonder. The effects of legalizing homeless encampments in Austin have been what any reasonable person might expect: a spike in violent crime among the homeless, including a rise in the number of homeless victims of violent crime, along with all the other attendant problems of homeless encampments like substance abuse and public intoxication.
Homelessness is a terrible, complex, problem fraught with a great many complications that not only make it insusceptible to a simple fix on the way in, but an exceptionally difficult series of interlocking problems on the way out. And the worst of the problem is that it’s not just that poor junkie who lives under a bridge, but the family with kids, where a parent lost a job or suffered a devastating illness that wiped them out, without family to help and no place to turn. The parents did nothing to deserve this, and then what about the kids?
But no matter how much one’s heart aches for those thrust into such terrible circumstances by misfortune, that doesn’t make answers come easier or mindlessly throwing money at a problem the solution.
By encouraging these encampments at the expense of residents, neighborhoods, and businesses—and at the expense of the homeless who were left to fend for themselves in the encampments—Mr. Adler and the city council managed to create a rare bipartisan issue in a woke one-party town. Proposition B’s passage wasn’t about party politics, it was about good governance, and on that count Austin’s leaders failed in spectacular fashion.
When well-intentioned, if fantastical, solutions fail, and the consequences aren’t just that the problem continues to grow, but it gives rise to the next level of problems for residents and businesses who share the concern but don’t plan to go down with the ship, it all falls apart. Money wasted. Lives unhelped. Misery spreads and there is no hope of a solution in sight. Remember, the alternative to bad isn’t necessarily good. It can always get worse. Don’t be like Austin. Get real, not passionate.
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Howl_ was it difficult choosing downtown over ..” Don’t sleep in the subway” or” I know a place”? ….
Don’t be silly. Austin ain’t got a subway system.
As someone who was part of the anti-Prop B campaign, called Homes not Handcuffs, it’s just not true that the homeless problem got worse – it just became more visible as people slept in tents in visible locations rather than in green belts. In the two years since the policy passed, Austin added hundreds of temporary and long term supportive housing units which work for the people who were able to access them. We still don’t have enough units to house the homeless population, and there are month long wait lists for affordable housing. It takes time to build housing – there are hundreds more units that will be coming online in the next 5 years.
Voters definitely wanted the tent encampments to go away, but going back to cycling homeless people in and out of jail for the misdemeanor of sitting in public won’t make anyone safer.
…in the next 5 years.
And you wonder how that didn’t fix an exigent problem. Religion is a hell of a drug.
You can’t build housing over night, especially in a pandemic. This isn’t some fringe project – the two largest local affordable housing providers are Community First Village and Foundation Communities. Community First started planning to expand by 1,400 units when this passed, and they’ll start accepting residents in the middle of next year. It’s using a combination of city, federal and private funding that took time to put together. Foundation Communities has already added 132 units in a project (Waterloo Terrace) that was started when this passed, and is continuing to expand. These are widely supported, highly effective efforts that even the Prop B proponents support.
Your blindness is stunning, but the high priestess thanks you for it.
Useful idiots gonna…idiot.
“(I)t’s just not true that the homeless problem got worse” seemed implausible. When something is subsidized it tends to increase, and Austin subsidized so heavily the government couldn’t spend all the money.
A minute’s search (no links) led to the results of the 2020 Point-In-Time (PIT) count:
“About 1,574 people had no shelter, an increase by 45% from 2019. Meanwhile, approximately 930 people were in shelters the night of the count, a decrease of 20% from 2019.”
Both measurements got worse. The camping ban was rescinded July 1, 2019.
Homelessness is a complex problem, and improving things will require facing facts, however unpleasant.
My guru on healthcare says it is a complicated issue requiring many solutions. . By comparison I think homelessness is complicated too.
It might be that there are many solutions and what works in one area might not work everywhere. And certainly the homeless should be a part of coming up with ideas .
Mencken.
I visited Austin before the ordinance repeal. Even then they had considerable problems. Whole blocks of downtown smelled like an open sewer. Panhandlers, though amazingly well-behaved at that time, were numerous. Groups of homeless people were smoking some kind of substance that stupified them to the point of moving like zombies. I saw police call EMS a few times to pickup smokers who were staring and unresponsive. A local told me the city had gone through a period of rapid growth, and just didn’t keep up with planning and development on the housing side.
Politics and passion often don’t solve problems, and the municipal government should have seen what would happen if they abandoned their restrictions on squatting and panhandling. I suppose they can chalk it up to “failed experiments.” Fortunately, I don’t foresee any need to return to Austin.
I live in Austin. The city government had been working very hard over the past two years to increase the number of homeless here, both by encouraging them to move here and by forcing thousands of people out of work in the last year. It’s not clear that their motives actually are idealism and stupidity–it’s not like we don’t have the examples of Los Angeles and San Francisco for what happens when the government tries to increase the homeless population. There are actually flyers all over the place around here accusing Adler and his cronies of doing it to drive down property values, as part of a real estate scheme.
I’m aware of the maxim that you shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but his actions over the past year has shown Adler to be a power-mad tyrant with more than enough malice to go around.
Well, Ken, obviously you need more homeless people to come to Austin so Austin can help them out. It would be a lot harder for the municipal government to justify sending your tax dollars to the homeless in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Harder, but not impossible.
How did it make you feel when you discovered this plot?
As far as I know, every compassionate attempt to alleviate the problem has made it worse. So I just look at them and sigh.
Any solution must involve a true understanding of human nature and supply and demand but government is weak in those areas.
Austin has allocated $73 million to alleviate homelessness. ST writes that 1574 people had no shelter and 930 were in shelters for a total of 2504. That is over $29,000 per person spent and not a dent made in the problem. I wonder who got the money.
It’s public record, and there’s been a lot of reporting. Austin significantly increased funding starting October 1, 2019, more than doubling the annual prior budget. There is a single full time employee, who makes $136,011 per year who started in January 2021. The highest single expenditure, purchasing one of 4 motels converted to shelter, closed on April 16, 2020. The seller was a SPE owned by Mohan and Hansa Patel. This was one of four hotels have added 300 beds.
The number of people homeless on one night is also not the number of people that the system helps. About 9,000 different people stayed in a shelter in Austin in 2019 (per Austin ECHO). The system really does get thousands of people back to a stable situation every year.
It never ceases to amaze me how you can simultaneously be so book smart and reality stupid. It takes real effort to be as smart as you are and yet so horrifically blind.
I lived in Austin for 12 years. Like other Texas cities, it is run by a corrupt oligarchy. The cronies who run other Texas cities have their own problems, but they don’t have to pretend to care about poor people, so they avoided the SF, LA, Austin “Homeless paradise” issue.
Please don’t be too hard on the corrupt cronies who run Austin. It’s hard to steal everything you can as fast as you can while convincing the voters that you really do care about income inequality and poverty. Turning your city into a homeless magnet is one of the best tools in the woke crony tool belt, and they need to use it. And don’t call it a failure. What kind of failure generates a $43 million slush fund that you can hand out to your friends? The only failure was that the stupid voters didn’t see the wisdom of turning Austin into San Francisco.
SHG,
Since there are no longer facilities holding the many who would literally try to fly over the cuckoo’s nest, the intractable problem of homelessness and severe mental health issues will continue despite well meaning but wasteful expenditures of large sums of money.
Without thousands of those like Nurse Ratched, realism demands despair.
All the best.
RGK
There was a time when it was trivial to put someone in a mental hospital against their will. That wasn’t good, but now the pendulum has swung way too far in the opposite direction, to the point where raving lunatics roam the streets wreaking havoc and nobody can stop them unless they commit a “serious” crime, and then they end up in jail where mentally ill people usually don’t fare well.
Can we fix the problem without going back to the other extreme? It’s possible. Will we? Probably not. There are no lobbyists for sensible mental health policy.
I remember Willowbrook well. I also remember what happened when they closed Willowbrook. Unfortunately, the lesson appears lost, as we go from one failed extreme to the other failed extreme. One would hope that the unduly passionate who care so deeply about their fellow man (can I say man? Can I say fellow?) would want to find real solutions rather than ideological tripe, but hopes are often dashed.
I can’t help but think that somehow $140 million in BBQ is somehow the answer.
I long for the days when you couldn’t build anything that blocked the view of the Capitol, 6th street was a bunch of ” massage” parlors and a semester at UT was $250
Once again we are reminded that while there is an easy answer for every problem, it is almost always a wrong answer. And I continue to be amazed at how many people believe that you can solve a problem by throwing money at it. That were true, we would have the best educational system in the world.