8 ms·

The city of Austin, TX could be a case study of what not to do. I was remotely employed to company with offices in Austin in 2014-2015 and it was awesome to vi

The city of Austin, TX could be a case study of what not to do. I was remotely employed to company with offices in Austin in 2014-2015 and it was awesome to visit and walk around down town. I always had a blast. I visited Austin in 2019 and there were homeless people EVERYWHERE. Every green space and nearly every street corner seemed to be littered with homeless people. The difference crystal clear. Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city.

burntoutfire 6y ago
> Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city. Or, the homeless are recent migrants from other areas? At least where i live, the homeless all congregate in biggest wealthiest cities, because it's easier to beg, their presence blends in more and also local communities are more atomized so they don't fight off the homeless as hard as in smaller places. I've heard a story of one homeless guy who have recently been sleeping on a bus stop near my home - he's basically travelling from one big city center to another, and stays as long as the police doesn't chase him off the area.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Not only do they tend to select larger cities, but also warmer cities. You mostly hear about the homeless population in places like San Francisco, Oahu, Austin, etc. If you're homeless, you might as well go to a place where you're less likely to freeze to death. Although there are some homeless in places likes Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, etc. Not to mention some cities will give them money if they take a bus to another city. Just shuffle the people around so it's no longer that current city's problem.
  - a3n 6y ago
    > Not only do they tend to select larger cities, but also warmer cities. As a trucker, my view is mostly from the interstate. The most homeless I see in my travels all over the country is I-5 in California, Oregon and Washington, and CA 99. It's pretty cold in Washington and Oregon right now. Even California at night. Tents, tarps, sleeping bags, on both sides of the freeway fence, or inside interchange cloverleafs. Not judging their condition or their person, I don't know them. It looks pretty rough.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      That's certainly cold. I was just saying from a relative position. For example, it's relatively warmer than the midwest.
    - paxys 6y ago
      In other parts of the country you will freeze to death sleeping outside at night, so west coast cold is definitely relative.
  - zehaeva 6y ago
    You do hear about it more in warmer cities, but the city with the largest homeless population is actually NYC by quite a large margin. https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/cities-with-the-most-homelessness-in-the-us https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/cities-with-th...
    - giantg2 6y ago
      I wonder if they have an aggregate comparison of warm vs cold cities. I'd still consider NYC on the warmer side (with the gulf stream on the coast) when comparing it to the midwest or even Albany. For example, even going from Pittsburgh to Connecticut can be an increase of 20 degrees due to the gulf stream even though you are going slightly north.
    - thehappypm 6y ago
      Per capita? NYC is 2x larger than any other city.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        LA/Los Angeles county (what the prior link uses) is a little larger than NYC, 10 million vs 8 million respectively. I would also be interested in per capita per city. Even more so for aggregates of cold vs warm cities overall.
        burlesona 6y ago
        There is no comparison. LA county is the majority of the LA metro, while NYC is the minority.
        burlesona 6y ago
        The most meaningful comparison is CSA: NY is 22.5M LA is 18.7M https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area
        thehappypm 6y ago
  - kleiba 6y ago
    [...] but also warmer cities [...] like San Francisco [...] Err...?
    - recursive 6y ago
      Seems fair to me in comparison to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia
  - onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
    Is there any data that homeless people "select" expensive cities? There's a lot of evidence that expensive cities create homeless people [1, 2, 3]. [1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18131047/homelessness-rent-burden-study https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18131047/homelessne... [2] https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/26/12652130/homelessness-economy-affordable-housing-poverty https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/26/12652130/homelessness-e... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-homelessness-such-a-problem-in-u-s-cities https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-ho...
    - mapt 6y ago
      Anecdata from long-term-homeless youth in particular suggest they're moderately mobile, and that they maintain three criteria: Liveable climate, how abusive the city is or isn't towards homeless people, and the presence of upper middle class residents & tourists to panhandle People, particularly families, who are briefly homeless until they get the next apartment or who are on the short-list for assistance, are less mobile. There are a lot of homeless people who have a job, have a car, but just can't make it work at the moment as far as housing.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Austin is becoming what LA used to be (and in the winter, still is) for the Midwest: the place for cities to send their homeless to so they don't have to spend money on them.
finiteseries 6y ago
2019 levels would be an improvement given what’s gone on in 2020, the pandemic has made everything much, much worse. A progression of one of the camps from Jan 2020 to Aug 2020 https://youtu.be/xbsXgU6PO6U https://youtu.be/xbsXgU6PO6U Downtown Austin a few weeks ago: https://youtu.be/aDvqut1zLso https://youtu.be/aDvqut1zLso
SaintGhurka 6y ago
To add some missing details on this, in 2018/19 the city council passed some ordinances that removed the criminality of some homeless activities. Specifically, they made it explicitly legal to camp in most public spaces (excluding parks) and they permit panhandling, sitting and sleeping on public sidewalks. So there's a lot of "campsites" downtown. A lot of tents, or just people in sleeping bags on the sidewalk. A lot of people peeing against the buildings. It's hard to score the upsides and downsides without starting an argument, but it feels like much of Austin has soured on the "decriminalization of homelessness".
- barbacoa 6y ago
  Worth noting, before the city council legalized homeless camping there were literally zero tents.
  - vkou 6y ago
    Did you have no homeless people, or were they still sleeping rough, just without a tarp to keep the wind and the rain off their heads?
    - barbacoa 6y ago
      There was always a homeless population but they would stay in shelters or camp deep in the woods and keep to themselves. Now homeless are leaving the shelters and choosing to live in the streets. since 2019 (when the camping ordinance was passed): * homelessness has increased 11% * Un-sheltered homelessness is up 45% * Numbers in shelters and transitional housing is down 20% https://www.statesman.com/news/20200519/austin-sees-11-increase-in-homeless-count-45-increase-in-unsheltered-population https://www.statesman.com/news/20200519/austin-sees-11-incre...
      - vkou 6y ago
        Why do you think homeless people are choosing to sleep rough, rather than stay in shelters?
jseliger 6y ago
Most American cities will do absolutely anything to reduce homelessness except build more housing: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en... California cities are probably the worst offenders: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but even Austin is underbuilding relative to demand.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  One of the very liberal reporters at the LA Times did a series of articles on the homeless crisis in LA a year or two ago. He actually had difficulty finding a homeless person who was from Southern California. Nearly all of the homeless were from other states or other countries. It's not California's failure so much as it is that the rest of the nation is using California to warehouse their homeless so they can feel smug about not caring for their own citizens.
  - michael1999 6y ago
    Remember that only 40% of Californians are from California. Most people in California aren't from there.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    Someone moves to California and later becomes homeless - is evidence of what?
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      No, it's not "someone moves to CA and later becomes homeless." It's someone becomes homeless and their home city doesn't want to pay to deal with it, so they buy them a $5 bus ticket to LA. Steve Lopez, the journalist I was referring to, interviewed a group of homeless living in Hollywood in one of his articles. All of the individuals were homeless prior to coming to LA, and almost all of them had been sent here.
jeffbee 6y ago
Austin story is simple: housing is overpriced, they are only slightly behind the same process as the SF Bay Area. In the time frame you mentioned Austin housing prices increased by 50%, which is ridiculous. There's not another mysterious cause of homelessness.
- austincheney 6y ago
  I think that must be an oversimplification. Fort Worth just to the north is growing at the same speed as Austin. My house has doubled in value in the last 11 years. Yet, Fort Worth is extremely anti-homeless in its city ordinances and we don't have a visible homeless problem. As Fort Worth is a giant city in a warm climate I am sure there is a homeless problem, but we residents don't have to see it.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Even so, housing costs in Ft. Worth are still much cheaper than in Austin, and the difference is widening. In the last 30 years housing in Austin has gone from 30% cheaper than Ft. Worth to 30% more expensive. It's easy to see why: Ft. Worth enjoys liberal-marketarian zoning policies and Austin suffers increasingly from left-NIMBY potectionism, meanwhile population pressure is actually higher in Austin due to job growth. That is why the Austin situation seems to me to be quite similar to the SF Bay Area. Not discounting that Ft. Worth local policies may do a better job of hiding homelessness, only I don't think it is the root cause.
    - res0nat0r 6y ago
      It's because the city council a while back decriminalized homeless camping, so it's become much more obvious and prevalent in high traffic areas. I can see this for myself if I walk a handful of blocks from where I live and see the new tent city which wasn't there a year ago. They're likely going to reverse this rule since it's not really fixing problem. https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/25/austin-texas-homeless-council-considers-hotel-housing/6699301002/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/25/austin-texas... https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/21/homelessness-austin-repeal-camping-ban-not-working-adler-says/4243652001/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/21/homelessness...
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
> Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city. Austin city council removed a ban on camping in public in 2019. The pitch was that it "decriminalized homelessness". Austin is still a liberal city, but revocation of the ban is now widely reviled given the tents and trash that have grown everywhere, without doing anything really to help homeless people. There is an initiative on the ballot for an election in May to reinstate the camping ban, and I'd take a 100-to-1 bet it will pass.
- shuckles 6y ago
  San Francisco has passed many bans like this, and the results speak for themselves. Legal prohibitions are quite separate from what will be enforced.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city I'd wager that they made the problem worse by importing rich people with a high tolerance for bad public policy and homelessness.
u678u 6y ago
Just another city run by Democrats. Seriously I'm a blue voter myself but its beyond parody how Democrats screw up their own cities like this.
- originalvichy 6y ago
  Im not american but looking at your poll numbers isn’t every major city democrat-leaning?
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. Nothing good can come of this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- thehappypm 6y ago
  yawn

burntoutfire 6y ago

> Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city. Or, the homeless are recent migrants from other areas? At least where i live, the homeless all congregate in biggest wealthiest cities, because it's easier to beg, their presence blends in more and also local communities are more atomized so they don't fight off the homeless as hard as in smaller places. I've heard a story of one homeless guy who have recently been sleeping on a bus stop near my home - he's basically travelling from one big city center to another, and stays as long as the police doesn't chase him off the area.

giantg2 6y ago
Not only do they tend to select larger cities, but also warmer cities. You mostly hear about the homeless population in places like San Francisco, Oahu, Austin, etc. If you're homeless, you might as well go to a place where you're less likely to freeze to death. Although there are some homeless in places likes Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, etc. Not to mention some cities will give them money if they take a bus to another city. Just shuffle the people around so it's no longer that current city's problem.
- a3n 6y ago
  > Not only do they tend to select larger cities, but also warmer cities. As a trucker, my view is mostly from the interstate. The most homeless I see in my travels all over the country is I-5 in California, Oregon and Washington, and CA 99. It's pretty cold in Washington and Oregon right now. Even California at night. Tents, tarps, sleeping bags, on both sides of the freeway fence, or inside interchange cloverleafs. Not judging their condition or their person, I don't know them. It looks pretty rough.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    That's certainly cold. I was just saying from a relative position. For example, it's relatively warmer than the midwest.
  - paxys 6y ago
    In other parts of the country you will freeze to death sleeping outside at night, so west coast cold is definitely relative.
- zehaeva 6y ago
  You do hear about it more in warmer cities, but the city with the largest homeless population is actually NYC by quite a large margin. https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/cities-with-the-most-homelessness-in-the-us https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/cities-with-th...
  - giantg2 6y ago
    I wonder if they have an aggregate comparison of warm vs cold cities. I'd still consider NYC on the warmer side (with the gulf stream on the coast) when comparing it to the midwest or even Albany. For example, even going from Pittsburgh to Connecticut can be an increase of 20 degrees due to the gulf stream even though you are going slightly north.
  - thehappypm 6y ago
    Per capita? NYC is 2x larger than any other city.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      LA/Los Angeles county (what the prior link uses) is a little larger than NYC, 10 million vs 8 million respectively. I would also be interested in per capita per city. Even more so for aggregates of cold vs warm cities overall.
      - burlesona 6y ago
        There is no comparison. LA county is the majority of the LA metro, while NYC is the minority.
      - burlesona 6y ago
        The most meaningful comparison is CSA: NY is 22.5M LA is 18.7M https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area
        thehappypm 6y ago
- kleiba 6y ago
  [...] but also warmer cities [...] like San Francisco [...] Err...?
  - recursive 6y ago
    Seems fair to me in comparison to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
  Is there any data that homeless people "select" expensive cities? There's a lot of evidence that expensive cities create homeless people [1, 2, 3]. [1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18131047/homelessness-rent-burden-study https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18131047/homelessne... [2] https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/26/12652130/homelessness-economy-affordable-housing-poverty https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/26/12652130/homelessness-e... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-homelessness-such-a-problem-in-u-s-cities https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-ho...
  - mapt 6y ago
    Anecdata from long-term-homeless youth in particular suggest they're moderately mobile, and that they maintain three criteria: Liveable climate, how abusive the city is or isn't towards homeless people, and the presence of upper middle class residents & tourists to panhandle People, particularly families, who are briefly homeless until they get the next apartment or who are on the short-list for assistance, are less mobile. There are a lot of homeless people who have a job, have a car, but just can't make it work at the moment as far as housing.
gamblor956 6y ago
Austin is becoming what LA used to be (and in the winter, still is) for the Midwest: the place for cities to send their homeless to so they don't have to spend money on them.

finiteseries 6y ago

2019 levels would be an improvement given what’s gone on in 2020, the pandemic has made everything much, much worse. A progression of one of the camps from Jan 2020 to Aug 2020 https://youtu.be/xbsXgU6PO6U https://youtu.be/xbsXgU6PO6U Downtown Austin a few weeks ago: https://youtu.be/aDvqut1zLso https://youtu.be/aDvqut1zLso

SaintGhurka 6y ago

To add some missing details on this, in 2018/19 the city council passed some ordinances that removed the criminality of some homeless activities. Specifically, they made it explicitly legal to camp in most public spaces (excluding parks) and they permit panhandling, sitting and sleeping on public sidewalks. So there's a lot of "campsites" downtown. A lot of tents, or just people in sleeping bags on the sidewalk. A lot of people peeing against the buildings. It's hard to score the upsides and downsides without starting an argument, but it feels like much of Austin has soured on the "decriminalization of homelessness".

barbacoa 6y ago
Worth noting, before the city council legalized homeless camping there were literally zero tents.
- vkou 6y ago
  Did you have no homeless people, or were they still sleeping rough, just without a tarp to keep the wind and the rain off their heads?
  - barbacoa 6y ago
    There was always a homeless population but they would stay in shelters or camp deep in the woods and keep to themselves. Now homeless are leaving the shelters and choosing to live in the streets. since 2019 (when the camping ordinance was passed): * homelessness has increased 11% * Un-sheltered homelessness is up 45% * Numbers in shelters and transitional housing is down 20% https://www.statesman.com/news/20200519/austin-sees-11-increase-in-homeless-count-45-increase-in-unsheltered-population https://www.statesman.com/news/20200519/austin-sees-11-incre...
    - vkou 6y ago
      Why do you think homeless people are choosing to sleep rough, rather than stay in shelters?

jseliger 6y ago

Most American cities will do absolutely anything to reduce homelessness except build more housing: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-end-homelessness-except-build-more-homes https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en... California cities are probably the worst offenders: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/ https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but even Austin is underbuilding relative to demand.

gamblor956 6y ago
One of the very liberal reporters at the LA Times did a series of articles on the homeless crisis in LA a year or two ago. He actually had difficulty finding a homeless person who was from Southern California. Nearly all of the homeless were from other states or other countries. It's not California's failure so much as it is that the rest of the nation is using California to warehouse their homeless so they can feel smug about not caring for their own citizens.
- michael1999 6y ago
  Remember that only 40% of Californians are from California. Most people in California aren't from there.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  Someone moves to California and later becomes homeless - is evidence of what?
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    No, it's not "someone moves to CA and later becomes homeless." It's someone becomes homeless and their home city doesn't want to pay to deal with it, so they buy them a $5 bus ticket to LA. Steve Lopez, the journalist I was referring to, interviewed a group of homeless living in Hollywood in one of his articles. All of the individuals were homeless prior to coming to LA, and almost all of them had been sent here.

jeffbee 6y ago

Austin story is simple: housing is overpriced, they are only slightly behind the same process as the SF Bay Area. In the time frame you mentioned Austin housing prices increased by 50%, which is ridiculous. There's not another mysterious cause of homelessness.

austincheney 6y ago
I think that must be an oversimplification. Fort Worth just to the north is growing at the same speed as Austin. My house has doubled in value in the last 11 years. Yet, Fort Worth is extremely anti-homeless in its city ordinances and we don't have a visible homeless problem. As Fort Worth is a giant city in a warm climate I am sure there is a homeless problem, but we residents don't have to see it.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Even so, housing costs in Ft. Worth are still much cheaper than in Austin, and the difference is widening. In the last 30 years housing in Austin has gone from 30% cheaper than Ft. Worth to 30% more expensive. It's easy to see why: Ft. Worth enjoys liberal-marketarian zoning policies and Austin suffers increasingly from left-NIMBY potectionism, meanwhile population pressure is actually higher in Austin due to job growth. That is why the Austin situation seems to me to be quite similar to the SF Bay Area. Not discounting that Ft. Worth local policies may do a better job of hiding homelessness, only I don't think it is the root cause.
  - res0nat0r 6y ago
    It's because the city council a while back decriminalized homeless camping, so it's become much more obvious and prevalent in high traffic areas. I can see this for myself if I walk a handful of blocks from where I live and see the new tent city which wasn't there a year ago. They're likely going to reverse this rule since it's not really fixing problem. https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/25/austin-texas-homeless-council-considers-hotel-housing/6699301002/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/25/austin-texas... https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/21/homelessness-austin-repeal-camping-ban-not-working-adler-says/4243652001/ https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/21/homelessness...

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

> Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city. Austin city council removed a ban on camping in public in 2019. The pitch was that it "decriminalized homelessness". Austin is still a liberal city, but revocation of the ban is now widely reviled given the tents and trash that have grown everywhere, without doing anything really to help homeless people. There is an initiative on the ballot for an election in May to reinstate the camping ban, and I'd take a 100-to-1 bet it will pass.

shuckles 6y ago
San Francisco has passed many bans like this, and the results speak for themselves. Legal prohibitions are quite separate from what will be enforced.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city I'd wager that they made the problem worse by importing rich people with a high tolerance for bad public policy and homelessness.

u678u 6y ago

Just another city run by Democrats. Seriously I'm a blue voter myself but its beyond parody how Democrats screw up their own cities like this.

originalvichy 6y ago
Im not american but looking at your poll numbers isn’t every major city democrat-leaning?
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. Nothing good can come of this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
thehappypm 6y ago
yawn