City leaders and residents are planning a series of meetings in the coming weeks to help them move forward and provide some clarity on efforts to manage the city’s growing homeless population.
The Aug. 8 City Council meeting – the first since the July recess – is expected to include discussion about creating a local government corporation in order to fund housing options for those experiencing homelessness. On Aug. 6, the community group SAFE (Safe Austin For Everyone) Project will hold a forum at Woodlawn Baptist Church to primarily focus on plans to open a housing center for the homeless in South Austin.
City Council approved a maximum budget of just over $8 million for that purchase and renovation in June, along with guidelines to staff to create a plan for managing the property to increase safety for the surrounding neighborhood.
Council expects to receive an update on those plans and the purchase this month, with the city working to hold a community forum about that issue at a date to be determined.
Other criticism has come from the decision to locate the housing center – which won’t be a drop-in site but will work with referred clients moving toward permanent housing – near homeless encampments beneath nearby expressways.
Cleo Petricek, an organizer of SAFE Project, said South Austin residents remain concerned that the property purchase was agreed to without a separate community meeting beforehand.
“If they’re handling this without community engagement … we’re the experts at what we need in our community and if you’re not having open dialogue at the beginning it blunts the opportunity to receive whatever their actions are,” she said. “Right now we feel that things are being rammed down our throats. Everyone already feels less safe.”
Among those who may be feeling less safe in Austin’s current climate are people experiencing homelessness. Earlier this month, a couple was targeted when a lit firework was thrown from a moving vehicle into their tent. The advocacy group Grassroots Leadership posited the violence was a direct result of the heated rhetoric that has surrounded the issue of homelessness since City Council’s June actions. Violence within the homeless community has also been in the local media spotlight in recent weeks.