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Three Cheers for Governor Abbott
Yesterday, October 2, 2019 Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter to Austin’s mayor demanding the mayor do something about Austin’s homeless problem. It has been out of control since the City Council passed a law legalizing overnight camping everywhere – except in front of City of Austin offices. As a result, Austin has been turning into San Francisco South-Central.
And if the mayor blows off the Governor? Abbott pledges to use state authority to clean up Austin if the mayor fails to solve the problem by November 1.
October 2nd is the anniversary of the Battle of Gonzales, when the Mexicans tried to take a cannon issued to the city to protect them from Indian raids. The Texians responded, “Come and Take It.” Hence the Gonzales Flag:
You can read Abbott’s action here:
Today I sent a letter to @MayorAdler about the growing crisis arising from the Austin Homeless policy.
Feces & used needles are piling up & residents are endangered.
If not fixed by Nov.1, I'll use State authority to protect Texans’ health & safety.#txlege pic.twitter.com/KmvEtMW81T
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) October 2, 2019
Keep Austin weird – not insane.
Published in Politics
This should be fun to watch.
Bug (Austin) meet windshield (Abbott).
Very good news.
Maybe Congress Ave. gets cleaned up…some. As bad as the city is on the unhoused problem, MLF.org is doing great.
I <heart> Gov. Abbott. He’s smart to tackle the problem now, while it’s still manageable. Would that we had a governor like him in WA state…….ideally, 10-15 years ago. Sadly, we did not, and the drug culture and attendant homeless problem have exploded. Seattle gets most of the attention, but it’s in other WA cities and towns too.
Prediction: Austin will find a way to temporarily house (read; hide) the homeless until Abbot’s people leave town.
Abbott lives in Austin. If they get them off the street until Abbott leaves town that should be long enough.
If Austin’s ruling class thinks it’s more equal than everyone else, how about legalizing camping in front of City of Austin offices, but nowhere else?
Call the camps Hoovervilles.
Obamavilles or Aldervilles after the Austin mayor.
Here’s the deal. UT has basically said, they will not tolerate any camping on/adjacent to campus. The chamber of commerce types won’t tolerate any camping that affects SxSW or Austin City Limits or 6th street. The money folks won’t tolerate camping in the condo tower sections below 6th street or in the residences on the west side. Once those regions are excluded, the other city council members (think of the city sliced like a 10-slice pizza) insist on the same rules. Every council member insists on NIMBY, but together, the city council doesn’t want a city-wide ban, so there is a stalemate. It was not a sustainable situation and Gov. Abbott is just accelerating the breaking point.
God, let’s hope Adler tests him.
These campers are not poor, disadvantaged or mentally ill people meriting pity. Since this policy started, the homeless are now dominated by young men who are gang leaders dictating who is allowed to camp in which spots.
I remember sitting at a traffic light and seeing the huge tent city, complete with bon fires, sprawling under the highway overpass. I-35 is an elevated highway, so the land underneath it is quite spacious. The strong young thugs strutting around telling others what to do was the biggest impression I had of the scene, other than the bon fires, that is.
How, specifically, will the Governor solve the homelessness problem?
Meaning: if camping is made illegal, where will those people go?
It’s amazing how people find places if they need to.
There will always be some people that are homeless, but what Austin has done is given people an incentive to not find places to go.
Austin city officials try to ban Uber and Lyft two years ago, as a sweetheart deal for the local cab companies and to force both local residents and out-of-town visitors to download and use the city of Austin’s own ride-sharing app. The based it on questions over the backgrounds of the drivers, but Abbott and the Legislature saw that meddling in private business for what it was and slapped the city down.
Same deal here — Austin’s progressive residents are protected from their own local government’s wretched excesses by being in Texas, where the state government can come in and fix the problem or force the city to back off from those wretched excesses. Of course, Austinites are happy the state does this, but then go right back out and vote in more progressive politicians, while hoping that some day the rest of Texas will become as enlightened as they are. What would happen, of course, if Texas became like New York or California, there would be no higher ups to prevent the city’s wretched excesses from continuing to get even more wretched, and eventually Austin’s homeless problem would be in the same league at San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle.
In and around Houston, there are plenty of homeless shelters. Some churches alternate responsibilities. Others focus on helping prevent people from getting to that point.
But you can’t fix crazy. And most homeless people have issues beyond housing that make them refuse help. Whatever the best assistance for that, it isn’t a camp-anywhere policy.
I’m not saying “tough luck” to them. I’m saying it’s a very old problem that no one has ever “solved” that I’m aware.
As with all charity, focusing on an individual or family at a time is something people can manage without government programs. Such problems push caregivers to the edge, but paid helpers are no less frustrated.
Interesting:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-answer-to-homelessness/
But then:
https://huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/homeless-utah-end-america-salt-lake-city_n_5cd1cac0e4b04e275d511aba?ri18n=true
From which:
As the economy has come out of the Great Recession, America’s unhoused population has exploded almost exclusively in its richest and fastest-growing cities. Between 2012 and 2018, the number of people living on the streets declined by 11 percent nationwide — and surged by 26 percent in Seattle, 47 percent in New York City and 75 percent in Los Angeles. Even smaller cities, like Reno and Boise, have seen spikes in homelessness perfectly coincide with booming tech sectors and falling unemployment.
File this under “You subsidize something, you get more of it“. The common denominator for where the homeless problem has been on the fastest rise is in areas where progressive government has decided it’s not their place to decide who lives on the street, even if the quality-of-life of other residents declines. Toss in ‘perks’ like needle exchanges and in the case of the Blue states out west the generally moderate winter climate on the Pacific Coast (something the Austin area also has), and you set up a situation where the homeless migrate to where they see the most permissive governing bodies are located.
We shouldn’t expect to be able to provide an answer to that question from on high. Top-down answers to such questions have done more harm than good. Given well over a hundred years’ experience, you’d think we’d know that by now.
But the bottom-up response often seems to be ‘somewhere else is good enough for me’, which just moves the problem along to another part of the state or country rather than solving it.
I wonder if that doesn’t mean we should subsidize more housing?
Perhaps.
I would think that the existence of the homeless per se is not the problem. Rather, the problem is that they tend to concentrate in very large numbers in cities where they find conditions most congenial. That is, cities with temperate weather and permissive authorities.
If they are forbidden by stricter authorities from public camping, drug use, and defecation, they might very well move out of these currently blighted cities, and, by spreading themselves out over the entire nation, cause only manageable problems for many locales instead of completely unmanageable problems for a few.
More Section 8 housing doesn’t solve the problem — if you have someone with a drug habit who’s homeless, they simply take the habit into the home, and you end up with a location that has vehicles stopping there at all hours of the night, and neighbors worried about their own security. Unless they’re willing to rehab, they’ll simply end up back on the street when they violate the terms of their housing agreement (unless they’re in a state where politicians ban Section 8 evictions. Then the neighbors simply continue to suffer because of government inaction, in the same way the homeless problems are on the rise in areas due to government policy that refuses to set limits on homeless anti-social behavior).
In the case of those homeless who are mentally ill, that’s more of a debate over funding for increased treatment and program funding (where in a reverse of the first problem, some who end up out on the street do so because they won’t take their drugs on a regular basis. And state coercion to force adults to medicate opens up its own Pandora’s Box of problems).
And it often seems not to be that way.
I, for one, don’t wonder that. If you subsidize housing you get more people using subsidized housing and fewer people paying for it, with bad social consequences.
It’s not an undersupply of housing at all. If these people wanted housing, then the housing supply would reach an equilibrium with the people truly wanting housing. Instead it’s an “oversupply” of people who aren’t willing to pay for housing, and/or are not willing to live by the rules necessary for the low-cost, subsidized housing that exists. True, there is a very small percentage of people who are homeless for some specific reason not related to drugs, but they’re a rarity, and their dilemmas are almost always short – lived. And if they were the only people out there, then helping them would be so easy… Why else do these so-called homeless people flock to the cities with the most unaffordable housing – if they were interested in housing (except free housing, if anybody will give it to them), wouldn’t they go to places where housing is more affordable?
I put “oversupply” in quotations, because in fact, there’s nothing of the sort, except in the eyes of those people who are on some sort of a guilt trip, and by choice ignore the true nature of the “problem.” The demand for free, er, “housing” rises or falls with the supply of such.
Basic Economics 101. It happens every time.
There’s this interesting article in the Guardian about cities giving the homeless free bus tickets to somewhere else, including some interesting graphics.
Intentions: include good ones.
Results: include good ones.
Australia and the US have similar homelessness rates (0.5%) – though I don’t know whether they measure it the same way.
Anyway, about 30% of the homeless in Australia have mental health and/or addiction issues, and about 30% are employed.
So there’s more going on than mental health, addiction or joblessness.
It can be a combination of who provides and who pays (a subsidy). Giving people some housing security seems like a good thing for society.
I have two friends who live in subsidized housing. For one it’s kept them out of Aged Care (which would be much more expensive) and for the other it’s kept them out of jail (again, a more expensive option for the rest of us).
Edited to add (again for Australia):
So we need to factor in the reason people are in need of assisted housing as well before using employment rates as a standard measure of its impact.
Then solve it for us, instead of stating the obvious. Build more overpasses for people to live under? Create a new Department of Ignoring Personal Responsibility? Blame Democrats for liberating the mentally ill, out onto the streets, where they cannot cope for themselves?
It’s funny how cities that provide generous support systems seem to have a ****-ton of people crapping in the streets. I wonder why?
It’s a mystery.
Didn’t Austin pass a measure (similar to the one in some California cities) where prosecutors would not go after thieves who steal less than $800 of goods per day?