[As Texas’ governor promotes sensational stories of homeless
violence and threatens a state crackdown, the people living on
Austin’s streets tell a different story.] [[link removed]]

GREG ABBOTT VS. AUSTIN’S HOMELESS  
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Gus Bova
November 1, 2019
The Texas Observer
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_ As Texas’ governor promotes sensational stories of homeless
violence and threatens a state crackdown, the people living on
Austin’s streets tell a different story. _

Raymond Thompson, known to all as "Uncle Ray," outside his tent under
I-35, near downtown Austin., Gus Bova

 

BETWEEN 2011 AND 2012, now-Governor Greg Abbott demolished
[[link removed]] a
4,500-square-foot home in West Austin to build himself an even bigger
house, complete with an inground pool. Since 2015, he’s had even
sweeter digs: the stately gubernatorial mansion across from the Texas
Capitol. By contrast, Abby, John, “Black,” Jolie, Gilbert, and
“Uncle Ray” live nestled beneath Austin’s highway overpasses. At
night, they curl up in tents—when they’re lucky—to fend off the
elements.

In recent months, the governor has taken to Twitter to spin a
narrative of violence and filth about Austin’s homeless population.
Beginning Monday, he plans to use state police and the transportation
department to clear out homeless camps beneath the capital city’s
highways. For the past two weeks, I’ve been meeting with the folks
who call those camps home to learn why they live there.

Take Abby and John, a married couple originally from the Houston-area
who’ve lived homeless in Austin for five years and asked I not use
their real names. Like most homeless on the city’s streets, they
won’t go to the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless, the
city’s major downtown shelter: They consider the area drug-filled
and dangerous
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plus they’d have to separate by gender. They’re desperate for a
real home, but financial housing assistance in Austin takes years to
come through for most applicants. For a time, they lived in a wooded
area in North Austin, until one winter day they both wound up sick in
the hospital, and when they returned, their tent and possessions had
vanished. They then bounced around, sleeping in stairwells or wherever
made sense each night, moving along whenever police told them to.

Then, in June, Austin gave them a new option: The city council lifted
[[link removed]] a
25-year-old city-wide ban on camping in public places. Thanks to the
new rules, Abby and John could set up a gray tent under I-35 near
downtown without fear of being ticketed or arrested. It’s far from
perfect: They say passersby sometimes yell at them, honk their horns,
or throw bottles, and some of their neighbors have drug and alcohol
issues. But having something resembling four walls around them means a
lot.

 

“This is a billion times better,” Abby said. “It’s just a
little bit of privacy. We can hide in here and not have to watch
people judging us.”

“Black” and Jolie are another couple living under I-35. Black,
who’s been homeless three years in Austin, says he was already
living in a tent before the camping policy changed, but police would
periodically order him to take it down or move it. He says he
accumulated 12 tickets for violating the city’s camping ban, which
became warrants when he no-showed for court. “It was stupid. I
didn’t have no money [to pay the fines]; I was barely eating,” he
said. “But since they passed that new law, they haven’t been
fucking with us.”

Jolie, who’s from San Antonio and is just 21 years old, said she
should get housing soon through a nonprofit that works with homeless
youth. But now, she’s afraid the governor will take away her current
best option. “If they kick us out of here, I’d head to the next
bridge, or if I can’t do that, then I don’t know,” she said.
“It’s crazy how they’re doing this, because we don’t have
nowhere to go.”

"Black" poses with his dog, Mr. Prince, at a camp near downtown
Austin, Gus Bova

Erroll Crawford says he's a Vietnam veteran originally from New
Orleans, who was first made homeless by Hurricane Katrina.  Gus Bova

Gilbert and Crystal, a couple living at a camp in South Austin. Gus
Bova

Mark, pictured in downtown Austin, says he's a Gulf War veteran. 
He's also a drummer. Gus Bova

THE POLITICAL FIRESTORM over Austin’s homelessness policies ignited
right after the late-June meeting when city council partially
repealed
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ordinances criminalizing the actions of sitting, lying, camping, or
begging in public. In response, some homeless folks emerged from
wooded areas to stay in places like highway underpasses. Those already
under the highways erected more tents, increasing the visibility of
homelessness in the city—though, according to service providers, not
changing the actual number of homeless.

Some saw Austin’s move as a sudden attack on decency and public
order. But the decision was years in the making. In 2017, an Austin
city audit
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the ordinances “may create barriers for people as they attempt to
exit homelessness” by burdening them with a criminal record. The
audit also noted that Austin’s panhandling ban was likely illegal:
Thanks to a 2015 Supreme Court ruling
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freedom of speech, courts have been swatting down such policies
nationwide on First Amendment grounds. In fact, even before June,
Austin police had already scaled back ticketing dramatically for all
three ordinances: Citations dropped
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more than 9,000 in 2014 to under 1,000 in 2018. (Though police could
still use the threat of tickets to achieve “voluntary compliance,”
as the cop-speak goes).

Austin’s decision was also part of a nationwide campaign to
decriminalize homelessness. In 2016, a pair of national nonprofits
launched the “Housing not Handcuffs” campaign to drive awareness
of criminalization policies like Austin’s. Last September, the
movement got a boost when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled
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unconstitutional to punish people for camping outside when shelter
beds aren’t available. Since then, a number of West Coast
municipalities have stopped enforcing or repealed their camping bans.
But Austin, as the governor would have you remember, is not on the
West Coast. As usual when Texas’ capital pushes
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of how progressive a Southern city can be, our otherwise laissez-faire
state has laced up the jackboots.

Since June, the governor has issued a stream of tweets about
Austin’s supposed crisis of the homeless-gone-wild. He shared a
tweet claiming
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homeless individuals caused a car crash downtown, a story that
later proved
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promoted a video
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a man throwing a metal sign at a vehicle, even though the incident was
nearly two years old and the man turned out
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to be homeless at all; he also cherry-picked
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which APD had already handled, to further a narrative of lawlessness.
Many of the claims he’s promoted were first spread by Republican
Party operatives or by pseudonymous
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dedicated to bashing Austin’s homeless. As critics note, the
governor has regularly drawn Texans’ attention to acts, like assault
and theft, that were just as criminal before June as they are now.

 

The most notable impact following the ordinance changes was a
42-percent jump in property crimes by the non-homeless against the
homeless.

“He’s not tweeting pictures of a woman sleeping with her child or
a person sitting on the sidewalk peacefully asking for money,” said
city council member Greg Casar, who helped lead the decriminalization
effort. “So it’s just totally political; he’s just trying to
score political points by punching down at the poorest people in our
community.”

Abbott did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Travis
County GOP Chair Matt Mackowiak, who launched a Change.org petition
opposing the council’s changes and hopes to get a measure on next
May’s ballot to reinstate the old camping ban, told me that his
efforts are not a partisan attempt to whip up Republican votes. He
directed me to a Medium post he wrote where he argues
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leaders are fiddling while Austin burns.” But a quote he gave to
the _Washington Post_
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August is telling: “This is our best example of [liberal] overreach,
so we have been very strategic focusing on this issue,” he said. A
PAC has also been formed
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intent to recall most of city council over the ordinance changes.

In October, APD released crime stats
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that, if anything, the most notable impact following the ordinance
changes was a 42-percent jump in property crimes by the
non-homeless_ against the homeless_. (That difference may or may not
have anything to do with the ordinance changes.) Austin’s police
chief has also denied
[[link removed]] there
is a “public safety” crisis, but Abbott has continued to paint
Austin as suddenly riddled with assaults by the unhoused. In the same
vein, Abbott has said Austin is now piling up with “feces” and
“needles,” even as city public health officials insist
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no evidence these problems are worse than they were before June. (For
what it’s worth, in my time in the camps, I saw some feces, no
needles.)

Homeless advocates say Abbott, along with President Donald Trump, is
using the homeless issue as a political wedge and, in so doing, is
inflaming a different crisis: The National Coalition for the Homeless
has documented
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2,000 possible hate crimes against the homeless since 1999. “My real
fear is the lasting damage that Trump and the governor are doing is
dehumanization of the homeless population that will lead to more
vigilante incidents,” said Eric Tars, with the National Law Center
on Homeless and Poverty. In July in Austin, someone reportedly
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a lit firecracker at a homeless couple’s tent, ruining it.

Meanwhile, direct service providers find the governor’s comments
unhelpful at best. “He’s adding more fuel to the controversy
around the ordinances,” said Greg McCormack, director of Austin’s
Front Steps nonprofit, which runs the downtown ARCH shelter. “I
don’t think it’s helped with finding solutions for
homelessness.”

IN EARLY OCTOBER, Abbott escalated his feud with Austin city leaders.
The governor sent Austin Mayor Steve Adler a letter
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to deploy a host of state agencies to combat Austins’ homeless,
including threats to use state police to arrest for trespassing
violations and the state health department to impose
“quarantines.” On October 17, Austin’s city council revisited
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camping ordinance and re-imposed restrictions on sidewalks and within
a certain radius of homeless shelters. Since then, Abbott seems to
have narrowed his threats, focusing on a state cleanup of the camps
under highway overpasses.

Starting Monday morning, according to state and local officials, the
Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) will send cleaning
contractors accompanied by state police to homeless encampments near
downtown and along highways in North and South Austin. The exact scope
of the action remains unclear: A TxDOT spokesperson, Diann Hodges,
told me that any items left behind will be removed and personal
belongings, including tents and bags, will be stored at an off-site
location for 30 days for owners to pick them up. A state police
spokesperson told me that criminal trespassing charges could be levied
at TxDOT’s behest against anyone who refuses to leave, but Hodges
said that won’t happen because “they are not trespassing.”
It’s unclear what might happen to anyone who leaves and returns to
camp in the same location: Abbott has instructed TxDOT to clean once a
week or more, reports
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Chris Baker, director of The Other Ones Foundation, a nonprofit that
helps Austin’s homeless get work, told me his organization was asked
by a state contractor to help with the cleanups, but he decided to
pull out this week over concerns the state would be “too
heavy-handed.”

TxDOT has posted notices at campsites that list three local homeless
shelters to contact, but those shelters are full and have long waiting
lists. McCormack, the Front Steps director, told me that Abbott’s
office only contacted him the evening before the operation was
announced, and that was the first time the governor had reached out
about Austin’s homelessness problem. In general, “sweeps” of
homeless encampments are discouraged by service providers and the
federal Interagency Council on Homelessness, which wrote
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2015 that “forced dispersal of people from encampment settings …
accomplishes nothing toward the goal of linking people to permanent
housing opportunities, and can make it more difficult to provide such
lasting solutions.”

 

“Organized homelessness is much better than unorganized
homelessness.”

This controversy comes as Austin, over the last couple of years, has
put unprecedented resources toward ending homelessness in the city.
The 2019-2020 city budget includes nearly $63 million
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address the issue, a $17 million jump over the previous year, and the
city passed a $250 million
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housing bond last year. In June, on the same day the criminalization
ordinances were changed, the city approved an $8.6 million
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in South Austin. The city has also swiftly slashed the population of
homeless veterans and youth, and at a recent council meeting, it was
reported that more than 400 homeless “households” had been housed
in the last three months.

At the same meeting, Adler suggested the state could help out by
funding more services for those exiting the prison system, the foster
system, and for mental health services. According to Eric Samuels,
president of the Texas Homeless Network, Texas does allocate some
$11.4 million to addressing homeless in the sprawling Lone Star State.
But “it’s far less than needed,” he said, noting that
Ohio—with less than half the population—pitches in $3 million
more.

It’s reasonable to question whether Austin should have done more
faster to address its homeless population, and it’s also fair to ask
whether the city should have built more shelters _before_ changing
its ordinances. Some advocates say just that. “I’m for the
decriminalization of homelessness, but I do think the city should have
done a better job in preparing shelter spaces … and communicating
with the public,” Samuels said. But it’s baseless, as some
conservatives have claimed
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to say the city isn’t taking homelessness seriously.

Homelessness is tough to solve. In part, that’s for the reasons you
often hear about: A sizable minority
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the homeless population suffers from serious mental illness and
addiction. But the problem, advocates say, is also systemic: There’s
simply a persistent gap between people’s incomes and the cost of
housing. Nationwide, the minimum wage hasn’t changed in 10 years,
and nearly all
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apartment construction in recent years has been of high-end units,
with Texas’ big cities leading that charge. Texas preempts cities
from setting their own minimum wages and lets state
legislators essentially nix
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housing in their districts. The affordable housing crisis is worse on
the West Coast, but Austin is well on its way: Rents have increased
some 17 percent
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2014.

Everyone I talked to in the city’s homeless camps complained about
the soaring cost of housing in Austin. Gilbert, a 51-year-old
African-American and East Austin native I met under Highway 71,
connected local homelessness to gentrification. “They’re driving
all the poor to the country, from the houses that our grandparents
owned,” he said, noting that he has a brother and a cousin living in
the same homeless encampment as him. In all, while black people
compose about 8 percent of Travis County’s population, they account
for 34 percent
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the county’s homeless.

One predictor of homelessness is having been to prison: One
2018 study [[link removed]] found
the formerly incarcerated were 10 times more likely to become
homeless—so it’s no surprise that those disproportionately
targeted by the criminal justice system would wind up on the streets
at similar rates. At a camp near downtown, I met Raymond Thompson, or
“Uncle Ray,” a 47-year-old black man from Bastrop who said he’d
served 11 years in prison, which has made it hard to get stable
housing and jobs. “You never really get out [of prison],” he said.
“Once you’re out, you already got the shit end of the stick.
We’ve been knowing this; we can’t cry about it.”

It’s also hard to even establish the scope of homelessness. The
federally mandated “point-in-time” count, or PIT count, is the
most accessible enumeration of America’s homeless. By that count
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Texas has about 25,000 homeless on a given night and Austin has a
little over 2,000—both numbers that have been fairly stable for a
few years but are substantially down from about a decade ago. But the
PIT count is widely considered an underestimate: Homeless folks are
regularly missed by volunteer counters, and those in hospitals and
jail on the night of the count are overlooked. That’s not to mention
that different federal departments and nonprofits define
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differently. Many advocates still use the PIT count to identify
trends, but the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty warns
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because methodologies vary over time and between cities, even that can
mislead.

The governor has made clear he’s not happy with Austin’s approach
to homelessness, but his proposed solutions are murky. In an October
tweet, he claimed
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Dallas—which has more unhoused people than Austin—has a
homeless-free downtown, a claim the local alt-weekly swiftly debunked
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In another Twitter missive, he said
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should emulate San Antonio’s 1,700-person Haven for Hope
mega-shelter—even though advocates nationwide
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and Alamo City officials themselves
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are pivoting away from large shelters toward a “housing first”
model that aims to move people swiftly into permanent, affordable
housing. On Tuesday, when the governor announced his TxDOT cleanups,
his spokesperson added that the Austin Chamber of Commerce would
“spearhead” a coalition looking for “longer-term solutions.” A
chamber spokesperson told me Wednesday that details would be
forthcoming.

No one thinks camps under highways are a permanent solution. But in
the short-term, they’re preferable to the homeless being scattered
in deep woods and drainage ditches. McCormack, the Front Steps
director, said it’s easier for caseworkers to find and follow up
with people when they’re in a stable camp. And everyone I spoke to
said the camps served as communities, where someone could mind your
things while you went to an appointment or to scrounge some food. As
Tars put it: “Organized homelessness is much better than unorganized
homelessness.”

Since May, the City of Austin has cleaned
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once a month, and is set to increase frequency in November at some
sites. The city generally does not remove tents or personal
belongings. Austin is also expanding
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homeless keep their own spaces clean. Both Adler and Casar told me
they’re open to providing portable toilets, too, something many of
the camp residents told me they could use. (Three free solar-powered
restrooms are already set
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pop up downtown early next year).

After months of vitriolic back-and-forth, it’s easy to forget the
basic insight behind Austin’s ordinance rewrites: shuffling the
homeless around, or hiding them, doesn’t end homelessness. As Abby,
one of the folks camped out near downtown, told me: “They kick me
out of here, I’ll downsize to my backpack again, wander around, and
sleep wherever until they come and tell me to move again.”

Or, as is often the case, we could look back to Molly Ivins, the famed
Texas columnist and _Observer_ alumna. “You cannot solve
homelessness by getting people out of sight or by just sweeping them
off the streets,” she said way back in 1996
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first passed its camping ban. Meanwhile, she pitched a sleeping bag
along Congress Avenue in protest.

READ MORE FROM THE _OBSERVER_:

*
THE GHOSTS OF JEFFERSON:
[[link removed]] This
East Texas tourist town calls itself “the most haunted town in
Texas,” but its whitewashed ghost stories elide a complex racial
history.

*
SHORT STORY CONTEST WINNER: ‘DEAR MR. GOTTLIEB’:
[[link removed]] Alan
Sincic’s story is a searing indictment of corporate America.

*
‘GHOSTS OF SUGAR LAND’ TRACKS A TEXAN’S PATH TO ISIS:
[[link removed]] In
this contemplative, vulnerable new documentary, a group of friends try
to understand why their former classmate embraced radical Islam.

_Gus Bova reports on immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border and
grassroots movements for the Observer. He formerly worked at a
shelter for asylum-seekers and refugees. You can contact him
at [email protected]._

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