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AUSTIN, Texas – A freeway overpass shaded Elizabeth Contrera’s tent from the hot Texas sun, becoming a constant homelessness for five years that began when her husband left her, she said. Austin Police Officer Rosie Perez passed the tent last week with a written warning for Ms. Contreras that she should be gone within a few weeks.
After a two-year battle over Austin homelessness policy, police officers begin enforcing new city and state bans on public camping. Amid a boom in growth that accelerated the city’s affordability crisis, homelessness has increased and local accommodations are mostly full.
“You are wondering, ‘Where am I going?’ and I have no answer for you, ”Ms. Perez said to Ms. Contreras. “But I know the process will continue.”
Cities across Germany are grappling with the question of how to respond to homelessness after the coronavirus pandemic. This fast-growing city of nearly 1 million people is estimated to have 3,160 homeless people, according to an estimate by the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, a nonprofit that serves as the leading agency for homeless services in the Austin area. While this is a small number compared to many West Coast cities, the issue gained visibility after a change in city policy resulted in homeless camps spreading across downtown Austin and popular walking and biking trails.
Police officers spoke to a homeless man in Austin, Texas on June 17.
Austin City Council members voted to lift a long-standing ban on sitting or sleeping in public in public in 2019 after witnessing its effects, mainly from homeless people and supporters. One man spoke of a friend who was killed while sleeping in a tunnel so as not to be quoted and who was swept away by a flood. Others said quotes made it harder to get out of homelessness.
The majority of city council members agreed, saying that camping rules criminalize homelessness and are inhuman and ineffective.
The backlash against the move came quickly from Republican civil servants, who often quarreled with Austin’s liberal leaders. Governor Greg Abbott promised to overturn the decision days after the vote. Matt Mackowiak, head of the local GOP, led a petition to enforce the camping ban on a ballot paper. These efforts gained momentum, with support from the police and some Democrats who were frustrated by the city’s limited actions.
After initially saying they would create specific areas for camping, city guides made no further adjustments to their policies. Efforts to buy and operate hotels as temporary housing have stalled. The Covid-19 pandemic hampered efforts to combat homelessness and reduced accommodation capacity.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler hopes the strong emotions surrounding the homelessness problem would motivate him to resolve the problem.
Photo:
Bob Daemmrich / Zuma Press
In May, city hall critics recorded two victories. Austin voters backed Mr. Mackowiak’s nomination, 57% to 43%, forcing the city to reinstate the ban. State lawmakers also approved a ban on camping on all public land in Texas, with a few recreational exceptions. None of the prohibitions specified where people evicted from public places should be sent.
“Your social experiment on camping regulation has failed so spectacularly that it is nowhere to be tried in the state of Texas,” said Mackowiak.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler said that looking back, both the council and city officials should have done better public space management.
“Many who voted for it [the ban] were not necessarily people who wanted to criminalize homelessness, but rather people who saw tents in the city and wanted us to be better, ”said the democratic mayor.
Some progress is underway. The first of four hotels bought by the city is now open as bridge accommodation, and several hundred more units are nearing availability, according to city officials. But the city doesn’t have temporary campsites for people to go to on short notice, and stakeholders have mixed assessments of whether there might be one by August, when the indictments and arrests begin.
Police in Austin began issuing written warnings for homeless camps last week.
A tree was decorated in a homeless camp in Austin.
In a camp on City Hall grounds that was partially cleared last week, 64-year-old Alvin Coleman said he has been homeless in Austin since 2014 and doesn’t know where he will go now, with the ban on camping again.
“The only way they can be concerned is if they get you on the streets,” said Coleman, who makes money to shine the cowboy boots of lawmakers and others who work at the state capitol.
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Mr Adler said it was easy to find support for action to create more housing for the homeless, but a political struggle to find the location. He said he hoped the strong emotions surrounding the problem would be the motivation to fix it.
“That time will ultimately be measured by where we land and that is uncertain, but I am more encouraged now than ever,” said Mr Adler.
Mark Littlefield, a City Hall lobbyist and policy advisor who also previously served on the board of the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, recently spent an afternoon bridging the gap between his downtown business customers and the people living next to them on the sidewalks .
“I understand it’s not easy to buy a hotel and get it up and running, but we’ve made it very, very difficult here,” he said. “And political football is people who experience homelessness.”
As Mr. Littlefield was walking around handing out bus tickets and taking information for personal assessment, he asked, “What do you need – besides a house?”
Tents lined the Austin City Hall area before the camp was partially cleared last week.
Write to Elizabeth Findell at Elizabeth.Findell@wsj.com
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