Council vows to make homelessness a top financial priority

City Council last week reaffirmed its commitment to tackling Austin’s homelessness crisis, pledging to use a recent data-driven report to guide housing and services investments over the next 10 years.

City officials will work with Travis County, service providers and other regional partners to finance upward of $350 million to strengthen the local homelessness response system as funding from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act is expected to run dry by 2026.

In introducing the resolution, which originated in the Public Health Committee, Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes noted the significance of passing the item in the first Council meeting of the year, underscoring homelessness as a top priority “not only for this upcoming budget cycle, but also as a priority for us in how we comprehensively and holistically address homelessness.”

In doing so, Council formally adopted the State of the Homelessness Response System report produced by the nonprofit Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, known as ECHO.

The analysis points to a need for hundreds of new shelter beds and thousands of short-term and long-term housing units and other services over the next decade.

Like other cities, local service providers are seeing a dramatic increase in people seeking homelessness services, including a 72 percent jump in 2023 compared to the previous year, according to the report. During the same period, providers also saw a 50 percent increase of people exiting homelessness.

Even with the expansion of available housing units and services made available with the help of ARPA dollars, Black Austinites continue to be disproportionately represented in the homelessness response system, although some improvements have been made, according to the report. While less than one in 10 people in Travis County are Black, one in three people require homelessness services, the report states, adding that a Black Austinite is six times more likely to experience homelessness than a white person. The report attributes this disproportionality to “sustained institutional racism that pervades our public and private systems.” Further, the report notes, “White people are more likely to remain housed than their Black neighbors because of advantages in housing, education, health care, employment, policing, and the criminal legal system …”

Overall, Austin has a higher rate of chronic homelessness than most other cities, according to the report. Males continue to make up the majority of homeless individuals, while 38.7 percent are females. Providers in 2023 served 122 people who identify as transgender or nonbinary, with the report noting that this segment of the population faces violence and discrimination at higher rates than other individuals. Additionally, providers served 280 more people from households of two or three people in 2023 than they did in 2022.

Matthew Mollica, executive director of ECHO, thanked Council for its commitment, in light of uncertainty over funding assistance from Washington. “This week, the federal grant freeze sent providers across our community scrambling to figure out how to continue doing the critical life-saving work of helping people end homelessness,” Mollica said. “We can’t tell at this point if this is federal indifference at best, or hostility and cruelty at its worst.”

Chase Wright, executive director of the Hungry Hill Foundation, encouraged Council members to include workforce development as part of their mission to address homelessness. “I ask that we are not forgotten in this process,” he said.

Finally, Chris Baker, who leads The Other Ones Foundation, noted that he is part of a new consortium of local service providers, including Caritas, Mobile Loaves and Fishes, and Family Eldercare, among others, that is working on a gap analysis of the current homelessness response system. He thanked Council Member Ryan Alter for his amendment to the resolution to emphasize that the statistics and solutions in the ECHO report will remain fluid over the next 10 years to better address different types of needs that may emerge over time.

With the adoption of the Alter amendment, Council voted to approve the resolution with Council Member Marc Duchen abstaining since the bulk of the work occurred before he took office this year. “As a result, I don’t feel like I’ve got a good sense of the complete picture (of the issue) and where the money would be spent,” he said.

Photo by Lars Plougmann made available through a Creative Commons license.

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