On homelessness, Broadnax seeks connections with housing and service providers

The Austin Monitor recently sat down with new Austin City Manager T.C. Broadnax to discuss some of the more prominent issues facing city staff and City Council as he gets situated in his job. For the last of four portions from the interview, he shares his thoughts on addressing homelessness in the city.

On the homelessness question, when you were in Dallas there were some really good strides made in addressing that issue. Are you seeing anything that could be brought to bear here from Dallas that you learned, or is it too different of a situation?

Being so new, one of the things that I’m finding most rewarding is just sitting with individuals, particularly in the homeless space, and trying to understand where we’ve been, what we’ve done, what we’ve tried, what worked and what didn’t work in some cases. Dallas has made some success. It wasn’t always easy, and it didn’t start out like that. Where we were in Dallas as I left, they’ve been seen as a best practice as it relates to a model that really is touching people where they are, meaning an encampment to housing and wrap-around services, even out in the field, as you’re moving through encampments so that you don’t lose the person while you’re having the conversations and you get them placed. So they don’t have to go, “Where are you going to be?” And we never find them again. They would go straight from encampment into housing and do the triage out in the street.

That was a partnership, growth and evolution based on our continuum of care and the other support services that we had. Their model has been obviously held by the White House in their initiatives that they’re doing. They’ve received quite a bit more funding there, probably 50 percent more annually from the federal government for the way they’re doing it. I am eager to sit down and have meetings over the next few weeks with many of the players that have been working in our ecosystem of homelessness here to really understand and find a way to lift up and move back into some trajectory, the assessment that was supposed to have been done several months ago. That’s to find a way to make sure that not just doing an assessment is something we can all agree on in the scope of services, but also what’s going to be a part of that process is laying out an opportunity for whomever is going to do that for us, to help us all agree on what is our strategy and where are we going to focus? And then given where we know the money is and what people’s strengths and weaknesses are, who’s going to play what role. We’ve got to attack it again across the gamut, whether that’s from the sheltering, which I think we do quite a bit of here. The city owns a few facilities that will serve as either. … There’s some work to be done on that.

There’s a giant one that’s going to be going off the map in March with the Marshalling Yard closing down.

We’ve got to figure that out, between sheltering, the rapid rehousing approaches that we use and the permanent supportive housing. I’m assuming there’s issues because there’s inclement weather all the time, so what are we doing with our inclement weather, sheltering and how we approach that back to the Marshalling Yard and some other commitments that we’ve got around accepting folk through (interlocal agreement). Sitting down, having those conversations and just understanding where we’ve been … there’s a lot of frustration. That’s not specific to Austin. That’s every large city. But I do challenge folk, whether Austin or not, to go visit some of these other cities, and you’ll see similar challenges, if not worse, that will put some things in perspective. For some, that’s the key to understanding that we’ve got issues and challenges. Probably not as bad as some, but what’s acceptable to us? We don’t want to see anyone out on the street, and we want to find ways to shelter. But that’s a counterbalance between the affordability issues.

My big challenge is, what do I do after 24 months with people in our system? I don’t want to put them right back into the turnstile. We’ve got to figure that out from funding to strategy and continue the conversations, not just amongst the folks trying to help people, making sure we’re touching and understanding people’s challenges and issues that are experiencing homelessness. I guarantee you, we’ve got people in our shelters that don’t really need to be in shelters. They’re ready to be housed. It’s just making sure we can find housing for them. That is important. Those people who don’t have a place to go because the shelters are full, get those folks in those shelter beds and move those folk out who are ready to be out. We’ve got to find them places to live. I’m just trying to get up to speed now. I can talk about it in the abstract, but I’ve got to understand Austin and what we’ve done. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. But I don’t want to repeat things that didn’t work here, and/or I want to understand why they didn’t work and figure out how to fix them if they were the right ideas.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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