No Home in Austin

Thoughts and prayers are heartwarming. Platitudes are great for rallying the troops to a cause. But you know what they don’t do? Fix anything. What does that take, money?

Along with the repeal of the camping ban, Mr. Adler and the all-Democrat city council appropriated more than $73 million for homeless-related services in 2020, a record for the city. It was so much money that the city had trouble spending it. By December Austin had doled out only 57%, or $42.3 million, which still amounted to tens of thousands of dollars per homeless person. Yet the problem kept getting worse.

The City of Austin, Texas, has a homeless problem. Wags will claim it because California sent its homeless down to Austin, but that’s neither here nor there. Whether people are from Austin or came there to enjoy the weather, they’re still there. And Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, wanted very much to help them. So he tried his best.

At the time, Mr. Adler said the answer to Austin’s homelessness problem wasn’t to arrest people for sleeping on the streets, an approach he called “ineffective and inconsistent with the character of this city.” He offered more publicly funded housing and services for the homeless, following the “Housing First” policy mantra of West Coast cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. “We need places where homeless folks can be safe and surrounded by social workers and others getting them the help and support they need,” Mr. Adler said.

The root causes of homelessness, or houselessness as advocates prefer because they believe it will be less stigmatizing, as if it’s not stigmatizing enough to be without a home, are varied, ranging from substance abuse to bad choices to circumstances beyond the individual’s control. Some find comfort in blaming the homeless for their circumstance, which is not only wrong, but deeply counterproductive. Homelessness is not only a problem for those people, families, children, who endure it, but everyone else. Fixing the problem matters. Blaming is worthless.

Fixing, however, requires two things. First, identifying the problems to be fixed, without emotional excuses and with a hard recognition that it won’t be fixed by sprinkling fairy dust over tent cities. Second, by coming up with plans that will work for everyone, not just the homeless but everyone.

The vote came amid a homelessness crisis in the city caused almost entirely by Mr. Adler and the Austin City Council’s 2019 decision to rescind a 23-year-old ordinance that prohibited camping in public places such as sidewalks, city parks and highway medians, as well as ordinances against panhandling and sitting or lying down in public. The predictable result was the emergence of San Francisco-style homeless encampments all over the city, especially downtown, which was soon inundated with aggressive panhandling, public intoxication and debris-strewn tent cities.

The people of Austin aren’t a bunch of Texas conservative yahoos. Some argue that Austin isn’t really Texas, but some northern city that got lost in the Republic of Texas. The city is strongly Democrat and, as Texas goes, deeply progressive. But even the passionate have their limits, and that turned out to be “inundated with aggressive panhandling, public intoxication and debris-strewn tent cities.”

Despite more money than the city could figure out how to throw at the problem, it not only didn’t go away, but got worse. Who could have known that becoming a magnet for tent cities with “tens of thousands of dollars per homeless person” would drawn in evermore people without shelter?

Austin had the will and the money to fix the problem, but it had no plan. What happens when you don’t and the City doesn’t want to deal with it? A referendum.

When it came time for voting, Mr. Adler and Councilman Greg Casar, who initially sponsored the repeal of the camping ban, campaigned hard against the measure, speaking at a spuriously named “Homes Not Handcuffs” rally on the University of Texas campus. Beto O’Rourke amplified the mischaracterization, tweeting, “The answer to homelessness is not camping nor is it criminalizing those experiencing homelessness.”

They’re right that the answer to homelessness isn’t handcuffs. But what it isn’t doesn’t contribute anything to what the answer is.

Proposition B passed by a vote of 57% to 43%, which means a lot of Democrats supported it. And no wonder. The effects of legalizing homeless encampments in Austin have been what any reasonable person might expect: a spike in violent crime among the homeless, including a rise in the number of homeless victims of violent crime, along with all the other attendant problems of homeless encampments like substance abuse and public intoxication.

Homelessness is a terrible, complex, problem fraught with a great many complications that not only make it insusceptible to a simple fix on the way in, but an exceptionally difficult series of interlocking problems on the way out. And the worst of the problem is that it’s not just that poor junkie who lives under a bridge, but the family, with kids, where a parent lost a job or suffered a devastating illness that wiped them out, without family to help and no place to turn. The parents did nothing to deserve this, and then what about the kids?

But no matter how much one’s heart aches for those thrust into such terrible circumstances by misfortune, that doesn’t make answers come easier or mindlessly throwing money at a problem the solution.

By encouraging these encampments at the expense of residents, neighborhoods, and businesses—and at the expense of the homeless who were left to fend for themselves in the encampments—Mr. Adler and the city council managed to create a rare bipartisan issue in a woke one-party town. Proposition B’s passage wasn’t about party politics, it was about good governance, and on that count Austin’s leaders failed in spectacular fashion.

When well-intentioned, if fantastical, solutions fail, and the consequences aren’t just that the problem continues to grow, but it gives rise to the next level of problem for residents and businesses who share the concern but don’t plan to go down with the ship, it all falls apart. Money wasted. Lives unhelped. Misery spreads and there is no hope of a solution in sight. Remember, the alternative to bad isn’t necessarily good. It can always get worse. Don’t be like Austin. Get real, not passionate.